Friday 10:00–12:00 CEST · live on Zoom · mandatory.
The last seminar. You present the open-ended discovery campaign you ran on the real microscope — set up and validated in Wednesday’s lab, then left running through Thursday — the direction you and your freshwater collaborator brainstormed, what your discovery loop turned up, and, above all, how you know the interesting bits are real. Same format as every week, tuned to a capstone with no fixed question. A few of you are drawn at random to present (7 min + 3 min discussion); everyone should come ready.
What to show (≈7 minutes) — present the WHOLE thing, in this order
Drive it from your live discovery dashboard, not a slide deck:
- (a) Setup. Your collaborator, the open direction you chose together, and your microscope/wells (which plate, roughly what you sampled). One or two sentences.
- (b) The goal / hypothesis. What you set out to find, and why it would be interesting or novel.
- (c) The discovery loop you built. Open your live dashboard and show it: the latest snap, the running hypotheses/findings table, the counts. Explain how the loop decides what to image next (survey → detect → quantify → hypothesise → decide → iterate, with memory across iterations).
- (d) Results + the discovery you made. The finding, shown from the actual frames — organisms, counts, tracks, the brightfield-vs-chlorophyll (live-vs-dead) comparison. Be explicit about what the agent proposed vs what you verified against the frames and real literature, and give the honest limits (how many fields you actually sampled; what you couldn’t confirm). A well-supported “the loop claimed X and I couldn’t confirm it” is a strong result — a novel claim needs real evidence.
- (e) What you’d explore next. One concrete follow-up the campaign opened up.
Prefer showing the live dashboard over slides. If your network is shaky, have key frames saved as backup — but the evidence is the star.
What the room (and we) will push on
- Did you direct the exploration, or did you just watch the loop wander?
- Is what you found real — verified against the images and the literature — or an unchecked agent claim?
- How did you tell living organisms from dead cells and debris? Show us the frame (and the chlorophyll channel) that settled it.
- Did you over-claim? A “plate A vs plate B” difference off a few fields is usually sampling noise — how much did you actually look at, and did you scale to real microns?
- Were you a good citizen on the shared instrument — did you image deliberately, or flood the queue?
- Could someone open your live dashboard / notebook and see the discovery unfold for themselves?
Close out the course
This is the capstone seminar — the last time the whole cohort is together before the final project. Show the work you’re proud of, be honest about its limits, and take what you’ve built here — interview, direct, verify — into your project client relationship. Make it yours: a clear, honest account of a real investigation you ran on a real instrument.