Welcome to the AIMLAC blogs!
The AIMLAC center for doctoral training is working to improve public engagement in the sciences whilst also providing students an opportunity to practice scientific and technical writing for a wider audience. Part of this effort is this blog, a place to find insights into the research process as experienced by PhD students from a multitude of disciplines, brought together by a shared interest in developing expertise in AI, machine learning, and advanced computing. So put the kettle on, and have a peruse!
If you are a member of the public, you may find this useful for
gaining an understanding of the work researchers are involved in;
discovering new links and connections between scientific field;
learning more about past and current UKRI funded research;
asking members of the CDT questions about their work.
If you are a member of the AIMLAC CDT, you may wish to use this to
check out what other students and staff are up to;
leave a comment or help start a discussion on a post you find interesting;
start Contributing yourself, and author a blog post!
Below are some technical details relating to the organization of the GitHub repository where this site is kept, and also guides for contributing.
Blog posts may embed figures, datasets, execute arbitrary code at compile time or sandboxed scripts when live, feature rich interactive graphics, and much more!
Each post has a creation and modification date, used to organize different chronological views when browsing posts. The blogs are also linked with tags, each of which is associated with a random color to aid a little with identifiability.
The comment system is vendored through Utterances, and uses GitHub authentication and issues to manage conversations. Try it out at the end of this document!
More will be added when the site matures to help keep information navigable and accessible.
The AIMLAC blogs are built using Franklin.jl, a feature-rich static site generator, and the site itself is hosted using GitHub pages.
An advantage (or drawback, depending how you view it) of this is that there is no web-server listening for requests, and no shared state between visitors beyond what is in the GitHub repository. Posts are limited to relatively stateless interaction, and metadata associated with each post must occasionally be duplicated to ensure the build is self contained.
If you would like to contribute a blog post, be sure you have familiarised yourself with the directory structure and anatomy of main.md.
A new post is added by opening a pull requests (PR) on the CDT-AIMLAC/blogs repository. Fork the repository, commit your post directory, and then open a pull request on the upstream repository.
Someone will review the post to ensure it meets all of the details to be plugged into the build system, and merged once everything is okay.
When writing a blog post, it is often desireable to see how the post will be formatted prior to opening the PR. Since blog posts are markdown, any markdown previewer will be able to give you a good indication of what your post will look like, but to get the pristine preview, you will need to host a development server:
git clone "https://github.com/CDT-AIMLAC/blogs"
cd blogs
julia --project=. -e "using Pkg ; Pkg.instantiate(); using Franklin; serve()"Note: this requires an installation of the the Julia programming language (takes about 2 minutes).
Contributions to the blog website themselves are also welcome! In particular, anything aiding accessibility and readability, as well as commits that would make the site more portable, are desired.
To get started, you will need to a development server:
git clone "https://github.com/CDT-AIMLAC/blogs"
cd blogs
julia --project=. -e "using Pkg ; Pkg.instantiate(); using Franklin; serve()"Please refer to the Franklin.jl documentation concerning how to edit the website. More relevant directories may include
_css for style sheets.
_layout for HTML documents which dictate the layout of different pages
_libs stores relevant JavaScript libraries which may be fetched by the site
scripts contains Julia parsing and formatting scripts, executed when compiling the static pages
JavaScript (NodeJS) packages may be installed for development, and may be made accessible to the site as needed. In general, the site is trying to avoid run-time JavaScript when possible to keep the site light-weight and accessible.
Blog posts are organized into directories, such that all content related to a particular post is co-located. The directories themselves should follow a naming convention:
user.post-nameThe user is conventionally the GitHub username of the author, and the post-name is any kebab-case short title for the blog post.
The contents of this directory should minimally include a main.md, a Franklin.jl-flavoured Markdown file with the text content of the post, and any number of auxillary files (images, audio, data, ...).
The user test-user has written a blog post on heating elements in toasters. Their post has a number of figures and a small CSV file associated, so the user has chosen the following directory structure:
test-user.toasters/
├── brand-data.csv
├── heating-curve.gif
├── main.md
└── toaster-schematic.pngAll blog post directories are kept in the posts top level directory in the blogs repository. Note that a post author may choose to nest several directories in their post directory, e.g. figures/, data/, in order to help organize their post. The precise details of organization are left to the preference of the author.
main.mdThe post text content is written into a file named main.md using Franklin.jl-flavoured Markdown. An additional requirement for the post is a preamble with some meta-data:
+++
author = "Name Surname"
affiliation = "The University"
title = "Blog Post Title"
date = Date(2022, MM, DD)
summary = "Short summary of the blog post."
tags = ["tag1", "tag2"]
+++This is used by the parsing scripts to assemble the corresponding post-card for a blog post, and to associate the correct tags and date with a given post. It is also used to help generate the title of your blog using
\maketitleTo see examples of this, see the posts directory of any blog post in the CDT-AIMLAC/blogs repository.
The source code and content of this repository is MIT licensed, which extends itself to all posts on this site unless the author specifies differently. In such cases, a LICENSE file will be included in the post directory to account for the author's wishes.