Activities
Here in IceLab we love creating opportunities for minds to meet and mesh. We want open ideas and methods to transcend traditional disciplines and find new paths together through our event experiments. We are looking for you to bring your brain to bear on these! Current event types include IceLab lunch pitches, hive talks, data and tech talks, book club, friday fika and regular seminars.
Lunch Pitches: For the Love of New Ideas
Lunch Pitches help you bridge gaps between scientific disciplines and encourage new collaborative efforts. Think of the pitches as an idea collider. You’ve been working on a project just recently, or it’s something you’ve had on the back burner but haven’t been able to get off the ground. Take the essence of your work, slim it down to its core question and present that to a diverse, interested interdisciplinary gathering all happily munching on free sandwiches. You take 5 minutes presenting and then the rest of the lunch hour letting the ideas flow in between you and the audience in small group discussions. The most important thing is to reach a broad audience with a question, challenge, or method that will engage as many as possible. The Pitches were inspired by the NABC method to communicate ideas out of the Stanford Research Institute.
Pitch Season 2023: More or less every other Thursday at 12pm during the spring term.
Next Pitch: February 16, March 2, March 16, March 30, (pause over spring break), April 27, May 11, May 25, June 8.
Location: KBC Glasburen.
For more information: gabrielle.beans@umu.se
AI – Medical Hackathon
Turning the hype of machine learning-powered precision medicine into actual science calls for collaboration between life-science researchers and data scientists.
Since 2021 IceLab and the Medical Faculty at Umeå University have held joint AI Hackathons.
The IceLab AI Medicine Hackathon’s has three stages – first, a pitch event to help ignite collaboration between researchers in life science and medicine with AI researchers or data scientists that would otherwise not meet. The second stage aims to transform interdisciplinary sparks into feasible project plans with proof of concepts for ground-breaking interdisciplinary research by offering new project teams several days at a location away from Umeå in which to work together on creating a grant proposal. In the third stage, those teams take their proposals and go on to seek funding – thus taking half an idea to a fully realized, funded collaborative project.
2023 AI Hackathon Dates
Pitch Event: February 2nd
Deadline for applying to the Hackathon retreat at Lövångergården: February 9th
Hackathon at Lövångergården: February 22nd-24th
IceLab Fikas
Unrestricted research fika on Tuesdays, and a social fika on Fridays, 2:30pm! We gather around and chat, and perhaps someone presents an interesting bit of research, a book, a TED talk, or even an ice-climbing adventure report to the rest of the IceLab, while enjoying a fika. The research fikas on Tuesdays can be connected to through Zoom.
Book Club
At the IceLab we give ourselves the space and time to consider and read about topics apparently unrelated to whatever research we are doing. We’ve read about productivity, taking rejection, communicating science, creating great presentations, and we’re open to suggestions! The Book Club meets once a week over lunch to chat about a chapter or two.
Past Books Include:
If you’d like to join the book club or suggest a title, get in touch! Viktor Jonsson is our current book club coordinator.
Hive Talks
A Hive Talk gives you the chance to sketch out an unfinished but developed idea. It should not be finished work. It should not be something you have never thought about. It needs to be somewhere in the middle where you have thought about it but not yet fully worked on. Think part hobby, part thesis. The idea should be something that you would be interested in exploring scientifically and possibly publishing. Thus, it should not be so “out there” that it cannot be publishable science but it should also not be so integrated in your everyday work that you are the only one who can work on it. A very informal environment contributes to an open, easy chat about research directions with IceLabbers and visitors.
Hive Talk Season: Starting November 15th 2018 through February 28 2019 at 2:15pm.
Season Hive Talk Schedule
Hive Talk 2018-2019 Schedule
Location: IceLab Living Room
Upcoming Events
IceLab Collaborative Event Experiments
IceLab is here to help other scientists reach across disciplines to find new ideas and collaborations. We experiment wildly with different event formats to help make this happen.
Lighting up life, feeding mathematicians and plants in pain
Lighting up life, feeding mathematicians and plants in pain June 14, 2022 Watch Lunch Pitch Video Pitch 1: Nicolò Maccaferri: Light as a probe to [...]
Symmetries and Optimization
Symmetries in math biology and Optimization May 17, 2022 Watch Lunch Pitch Video First Pitcher: Fredrik Ohlsson, Associate professor at Department of Mathematics and Mathematical [...]
DNA, Networks and Forests: Lunch Pitch
DNA’s Dark Matter, Robust Networks and Forest Canopies May 3, 2022 Watch Lunch Pitch Video First Pitcher: Peter Kindgren, Researcher, Department of Forest Genetics and [...]
Forest canopies, children’s tastes, and new bioinformatic tools
In search of collaborators to study forest canopies, childrens' tastes and new bioinformatic tools April 26, 2022 Three researchers pitched projects during the IceLab multidisciplinary postdoctoral project call information session. They [...]
Giving Advice and Mnemonics March 22 Lunch Pitch
Giving Advice and Mnemonics March 22, 2022 Watch Lunch Pitch Video First Pitcher: Linus Andersson, Docent Linus Andersson, Department of psychology, Umeå university, and deputy director [...]
Mars and Motion Lunch Pitch March 1 2022
Mars and Motion March 1, 2022 Watch Lunch Pitch Video First Pitcher: Merve Yesilbas, Assistant Professor at Department of Chemistry and Group Leader of Yeşilbaş Lab. ‘Planetary [...]