Tutorial 1: Healthy and Sustainable Productivity Habits for Academics

As academics, we often grapple with an overwhelming workload and a multitude of roles. Our responsibilities span teaching, research group management, student supervision, funding acquisition, paper writing, and complex administrative duties—all while striving to maintain a private life and mental well-being. This challenge is exacerbated by an avalanche of emails and a seemingly endless stream of meetings that consume a significant portion of our time.

Unfortunately, we receive little guidance on how to manage these demands effectively. Many of us default to strategies that served us well during our student and PhD years: being primarily driven by deadlines and extending our hours into evenings and weekends. This approach is unsustainable, leading to an unhealthy work-life balance and, ultimately, burnout. The consequences are severe: frustration, demotivation, and disillusionment with our academic work. Moreover, as research group leaders, we inadvertently transmit this toxic work culture to our teams and students.

This workshop aims to break this negative cycle and help you to establish healthy, sustainable productivity habits. We will introduce an alternative approach on how to think about your role in academia. We will provide modern tools to define your own, sustainable working style so that you can be highly successful, while at the same time be happy and fall again in love with your academic work.

Main Contact: Prof. Helmut Hauser, Bristol University

Tutorial 2: Soft Robotics Simulators Install and Tutorials

In the past few years a multitude of soft robotics simulators have emerged, each with its unique characteristics and models, and each suitable for different subsets of applications. The variety of simulators has recently blossomed with the arrival of differentiable simulators. As a result, it can be challenging for new researchers to decide which simulator is most suitable for their project. This event will provide brief overview talks of existing simulators and then we will spend the bulk of our time running an “install-fest” and “hack-a-thon” using these simulators. As a group, we will solicit simulator submissions from the community, develop a rubric to judge them by, and then assess the simulators using the rubric. This highly interactive and exciting process aims to unite the community, foster collaboration, and develop common resources for researchers looking to use soft robotic simulators.