At the CRI, students create their own discussion clubs on subjects of their choice. Each club unites students and researchers on a voluntary basis interested in deepening their knowledge in a particular interface with Life Sciences through open dialogue across disciplines.
The clubs are open for all those who wish to participate providing they keep the spirit of the CRI: mutual sharing of ideas and thoughts, respecting all participants and ensuring the leading role of the students in managing and orienting the club.
The minimal requirements for a Club are: one student as 'club mediator', at least three motivated students, planification of at least 5 meetings before launching the club, documentation of their discussion made public through the club's wiki, with the possibility of having a restricted access area for internal discussions as well as for copyright protection where necessary.
Thanks to the generous support of the Liliane Bettencourt program, the CRI provides all necessary logistics, including invitation of guest speakers and the possibility of setting up students-organised conference by the club members.
Digital Synthetic Biology club
Club Mediator: Helena Shomar
Club Treasurer: Aude Bernheim
First Club Members: Rebecca Richard, Axel Viala, Marine Lehue, Raphael Ferreira, Aude Bernheim, Helena Shomar, Jerémie Chaligné, Sai Prasanna, Nicola Bertoldi, Jean-Etienne Bergemer, Jun Fan, Oscar Hernandez, Jake Wintermute, Adrien Bernheim (Graphic designer)
Set goals:
The main goal of the club is to gamify the concepts of synthetic biology, and introduce them into an online multi-player platform in order to educate and stimulate the public's scientific creativity, as well as allow citizen contribution to research.
We aim to create a gaming platform that includes:
- Pedagogical tools for teaching the scientific concepts of synthetic biology
- Game challenges that stimulates scientific creativity and interest
- Fast and easy accessibility to the information related to the scientific concepts present in the game (Wikipedia pages, articles, labs...)
- Tools for sensitizing the population on today's scientific challenges and biotechnologies
- Active citizen contribution to scientific research
- Communication between the scientific community and the amateur public
Draw Me Why (Doodle Video Club)
Club mediator: Stéphane Debove
Club treasurer: Flora Vincent
Set goals:
Why to use videos? As reflected by the internet statistics, people love watching videos more than reading text. Youtube is the third most consulted website after Google and Facebook, and companies like Cisco predict that as much as 90% of all the internet traffic in late 2013 could be online video watching traffic. Videos are also easily shared on the web, so the promotion part will be limited. In short, videos are the best way to connect with as many people as possible, which is already a good start when trying to make science popularization.
Why to use drawings? Drawings are a convenient way to talk about any subject, even abstract scientific subjects, without buying movie sets or accessories. Doodle videos are mesmerizing, people love them and usually watch them entirely (for these reasons, they are already used a lot in marketing). Doodle videos have been popularized recently, and people are not yet bored of it. Finally, knowing how to draw is not a very rare talent, so it paves the way for collaborations.
IVAI In vitro Artificial intelligence (IVAI-Fabelier)
Maintainers: Maéva Vignes, Jérémie Sibille, Mélanie Strauss
Set goals:
IVAI Club, created in 2008 in Dourdan, is now joining Fabelier to share his interests and broaden his perspectives and actions. IVAI club is a group of young researchers who want to explore artificial intelligence procedure applied to experimental neurosciences. We are interested on how to create a minimal 'living system' (indeed central nervous system) on a petri dish which could embodied a given environment and learn a task just like animals does. We are getting inspired by in silico artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. A first FdV master student as already successfully achived preliminary experiments in the MMBM lab (Macromolecules and Microsystems in Biology and medicine). There was achieved subpopulations of neurons in microfluidics compartments, all optically monitored (channels rhodopsin for stimulation and calcium imaging for recordings). Beyond our research and experimental goal we want to foster our relationship with the Fabelier community with the help of interdisciplinary meeting around scientific publication in our different field, on a defined subject. The first common meetings have started last year and were quite successful in term of attendance and discussions. We shall explore the many domains from artificial intelligence to learning, in silico, in vitro, and in vivo. We will use our interdisciplinarity to approach and model our brain and our communication means in a unique way.
To achieve our many goals we will organize debates, seminars within the clubs or with invited speakers and workshops sessions. We will also try to get interns involved in our joined work and research questions.
Life is Copyleft (Fabelier)
Maintainer: Benjamin Driquez
Set goals:
We are a group of young scientists that strongly believe in free science. Particularly, we do think that we shouldn't have to pay for software that are needed for science as the quality of a research shouldn't be ruled by grants!!!
We want to build up a club where members/participants, using free operative system, will learn the basics of programming (C, C++ and Python), writing report and making presentation. We will also introduce some image processing as well as data analysis free software (R, ImageJ, OpenCV ...).
We will start by introducing the idea of open source and our aim by the end of this year is to make all members switching to open source software. One originality of our club is that members will learn from each other, so that, we will build up a big "RER" where people will earn how to teach and to learn. During the year, we will have around 15 meetings; one each 15 days. For each session, a well define subject will be presented by a member or a guest. We will use our first meeting to really define what an open source system is, and how to install it. We decide to use Ubuntu as it involves the most active community. This active community will be helpful during the second meeting, when we will introduce the Facing/Solving problems on linux.
The introduction on the use of terminal in opposite to graphical interfaces will be done during the third meeting. After this big introductive part, we will start the programming part followed by the learnt of a given free softwares.
Examples of softwares : LinuxC, C++, Python, LaTeX, ImageJ, OpenCV, Micromanager, R/Gnuplot, SajeMath, Octave.
Night Science Club
Permanent club participants: Antoine Decrulle, Paul Villoutreix, Clément Vulin
Set goals:
François Jacob made a distinction between "Day Science" and "Night Science". "Day Science" is the precise and logical science done at the bench in the lab; it's the science that can be read in the scientific articles. On the contrary, "Night Science" corresponds to the ideas we can formulate during the night; it corresponds to the, not necessarily true, ideas that emerge outside of the rigorous scientific work.
The aim of our proposal is to develop and extend this "Night Science" to groups of people. The idea would be to create the condition for formulating these informal ideas in an informal way. The first step would be to have a calm and relax space to discuss or a meaningful place which can generate informal scientific discussions. Everyone interested in this Night Science should be allowed to participate as several points of views are helpful to see unseen aspects of certain scientific topics.
Play HD: Creation of board games to teach science
Mediator: Adrien Bouclet
Participants: Alix Sauve, Isabelle Hedon, Yohan Farouz, Delphine Ladarre, Marie André
Set goals:
Work on the creation of scientific game to allow people learning science when they play. People won't need background to play those games but when they play they will learn some term, principle of different biological system, or different organism strategies or development.
Our final objective is to produce a game we can sell.
Secondary objective: We will also try to implement a research dynamic to make people thinking on research problematic or make them resolve research kind of problems.
Robotics/Fablab (Fabelier)
Maintainers: Kevin Lhoste, Alexandre Faraino
Set goals:
Our goal is to explore the knowledge about electronics towards building a robot, his structure and the algorithms that will determine his behaviour. One of our purposes will be to find the right balance between educational, scientific and practical characteristics of the robots.
In order to answer to a formal deadline, we decided to participate in several international competition of Robotics.
Science Journalism: Naked Science
Club treasurer: Fanny Bernardon
Members: Asma Safsaf, Aïmen El Assimi, Maxime Borry, Lucy Kundura, Adrien Duchadeuil, Perla Bokobza, Jing Jin, Adrien Engel, Ramine Mecheri, Hester Velthuis, Nader Yatim
Set goals:
The main aim of the club would be to carry on a blog, dealing with science in general, and promoting our studies. It would, in majority, deal with science actuality, with a big folder, and other smaller papers composed by portraits of PhD students, report of a laboratory visit, funny micro-sidewalk and science articles critics. It would also present the CRI actuality by gathering the others club events, in a readable way. Furthermore, we would try to meet journalists and newsrooms so that they could advise us as for our blog or our studies.
Software Hacking (Fabelier)
Maintainers: Antoine Mazières, Samuel Huron, Julien Palard
Set goals:
The aim of this club is to enjoy software hacking, and explore all its possible forms, structures and usages, being some Netart, some tiny and useful web services, some socially engaged features, etc. We want to focus on realizing prototypes and make them available to everyone (Open-Source, Creative Commons content), while create a real incentive for participants to go further in their quest through Research (Entrepreneurship or Academic, or else...).
We also enjoy very much inviting people to talk about their work, product, technologies, vision (almost 100 workshops). During the 2 past years we've built a community of 300 participants online (Mailing-List) and 5 to 20 regular IRL members. We are glad to share this community with other projects related to our topics such as Copyleft, Robotics and Fablab and IVAI.
Last but not least, we organize programming workshop were people come and share coding tips and tricks, styles and vision about programming, regardless their level. Those workshop had a great success and will go on all the coming year.
Synthetic biology journal club
Organizers: Antoine Decrulle, Aleksandra Nivina (treasurer)
Set goals:
The idea of the club is to promote synthetic biology among students of different levels and disciplines (physicists, biologists, engineers...) and create a community for people interested in this subject. The main activities will be: in a first time learning what is synthetic biology, reading and discussing recent publications in the field to keep us up to date, sharing ideas and much more. The club is also the incubator of the Paris iGEM team by allowing people interested by the competition to get acquainted and brainstorm for the next year's project. Most importantly, the participants will be incited to actively participate in the discussions, prepare presentations on a selected topic, possibly work in a team. Another goal of the club might be the creation of the first association of French iGEM participant that has for goal the organization of an annual conference regrouping all French iGEM teams.