Group policies

Office assignment

• Faculty members get an office alone. Senior faculty get larger offices. 
• The more junior a team member is:
  • M1 interns are more junior than M2 interns
  • M2 interns are more junior than PhD students
  • PhD students are more junior than anyone with a PhD, including engineers and post-docs holding a PhD
  • engineers holding  a Master diploma but not a PhD are at the same level as PhD students

               the more likely (s)he will share her/his office with someone else.

• As the current configuration (people in the team and available offices) allows, we try to give people holding a PhD an office alone.
• The office situation at some point may have exceptions to the above rules. This is because we tried to give the best work conditions to every team member when they joined, based on the office situation then. Also, our offices are heterogeneous (1-person offices smaller on Inria side; more 1-person offices on the Inria side, etc.) and historically we “first” hosted team members which were Inria employees on the Inria side, and those which are Polytechnique employees on the X side.

Trips to conferences and others

• When a paper is accepted at a conference with a PhD student author, the PhD student has absolute priority for traveling at the conference (if there is not enough funding to cover all the team members’ trips, the PhD student’s trip goes first).
• To save grant money, we ask everyone to register in early-bird mode, unless there was an exceptional reason for not doing so.
• Depending on how expensive the conference is (the global cost can vary wildly between e.g. an Eastern European country and California or Canada), we may ask folks going on a trip to try to save money for instance by sharing a flat rented through AirBnB or by taking advantage of lower-cost housing options provided by various conferences, for instance, specific student accommodation options. Other groups do this also (e.g. PETRUS).
• To the extent that there is enough money:
  • more than one author may attend a conference for a given paper.
  • team members can attend a conference even without a paper published there.

In these cases, Who actually goes is a complex combination of: how much merit every author has;
what other opportunities (e.g., networking, job interview, visibility…) are enabled by sending the
team member there; and specific funding opportunities that may be tied to each person. For instance,
several PhD funding channels bring a fixed sum (about  5K€) for that student (only) to go on
conference trips.