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, hackathons, 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 2025: Eight occasions, every other Wednesday at 12pm during the spring term.
Pitch Dates:12 February, 26 February, 12 March, 26 March, 9 April, 23 April, 7 May, 21 May
Location: KBC Glasburen.
For more information: gabrielle.beans@umu.se
Hive Talks, Seminars, Popular Science 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.
Seminars are similar to regular research talks and are given by IceLab members, affiliates and guests when a deeper dive into a research topic is desired.
Popular science talks are an open introduction to an area an Icelabber or guest is interested in but is not an expert in. No limits!
Location: IceLab Living Room
Hackathons
IceLab Hackathons have three stages – first, pitch events to help ignite collaboration between researchers. 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.
Prior hackathons include the AI-Medical Hackathons, turning the hype of machine learning-powered precision medicine into actual science calls for collaboration between life-science researchers and data scientists. IceLab and the The Faculty of Medicine’s Council for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, MAI, Umeå University, collaborate to hold these events.
Teaching
IceLab’s interdisciplinary nature lends itself to a great mix of courses taught by our team members. Find out a little bit more about the teaching activities going on and held in collaboration with IceLabbers.
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:
Deep Work – Cal Newport
The Science of Science – Dashun Wang and Albert-László Barabási
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know – Adam Grant.
What’s your message – Cam Barber
Ignorance – Stuart Firestein
Radical Focus – Christina Wodtke
Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter – Nancy Baron
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business –Charles Duhigg
slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations – Nancy Duarte
Made to stick – Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Craft of Research – W. Booth, G. G. Colomb, J. M. Williams
Packing for Mars – Mary Roach
Artificial Intelligence: A guide for thinking humans – Melanie Mitchell
Scale – Geoffrey West
If you’d like to join the book club or suggest a title, get in touch! Josephine Solowiej-Wedderburn is our current book club coordinator.
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.
Hive Talk Board: Challenges in academic publishing with András Bóta
Challenges in academic publishing with András Bóta Hive Talk Snippet András presented a blueprint of the scientific research machine and asked what can be done to improve it. We discussed [...]
Hive Talk Board: Information games for squirrels with Martin Rosvall
Information games for squirrels with Martin Rosvall Hive Talk Snippet Martin presented a class of information games that include popular board games such as Clue and Battleship. In these games, [...]
Hive Talk Board: A Smarter Literature Review with Gabrielle Beans
A Smarter Literature Review with Gabrielle Beans Hive Talk Snippet Gabrielle presented the challenge of how to do a better, unbiased literature review when the literature is over 10,000 scientific [...]
Hive Talk Board: Micro Loans and Crowdfunding in the Charity Space with Ludvig Lizana
Micro Loans and Crowdfunding in the Charity Space with Ludvig Lizana Hive Talk Snippet Ludvig began our season of hive talks with a presentation of the kiva loan data [www.kiva.org] [...]
Ignorance
Ignorance: How it drives science Author: Stuart Firestein This book has new take on ignorance — what we as a scientific community don’t know. Overall, the book club members enjoyed reading it, [...]
Cell Biology Pitches: Tumors, Imaging, Tissue Formation and Genotoxins
Cell Biology Pitches: Tumors, Imaging, Tissue Formation and Genotoxins A new twist on an IceLab classic Adapted from IceLab’s popular lunch pitches, we recently hosted an Open Project Pitch session [...]