All PhD students in our department (EE), in the Lyle school of engineering (SMU), are required to give a 15-min lunch-time talk in front of fellow PhD students and professors at least once every semester. This short-time talk/presentation, called the “Brown Bag Talk,” is meant to help PhD students in many ways, such as improving presentation skills, networking skills, etc. In addition, it encourages interaction among students, who are usually working in their own problems, to know about others’ work. However, the talk is not necessarily limited to one’s own PhD problem.

So, when it was my turn to lecture, I decided to talk about the use of open-source tools in research. In particular, I wanted to concentrate on two open-source tools that I regularly use in my everyday work — Python and Zotero. Zotero and its other free and open-source alternative, Mendeley, are very powerful and easy to use citation management system with lots of other useful capabilities. I also demonstrated few of the useful features of Zotero and some of the interesting language capabilities of Python during the presentation.

Here are the slides (images) from the presentation. The presentation contain animations,  so I have provided a link  to download the slides (powerpoint) from slideboom at the end of this post. Please feel free to use it as it may seem fit.

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