Columbia DAP Lab Website

The official website for the Data, Agents, and Processes Lab (DAPLab) at Columbia University.

Editing Content

After editing, please test your changes locally using Docker (see below), submit a Pull Request to Columbia-DAP-Lab.github.io, and request @Alex-XJK (for students or general inquiries) or @sirrice (for faculty-related inquiries) to review and merge.

If you are adding a new feature or making significant changes, please talk to our maintaining team in advance.

Contributing Your Profile

You can now add yourself or update your profile by editing the _data/people.yml file.

For Faculty members:

- name: Your Name
  homepage: (optional) https://your.website
  image: (optional) /files/images/avatar/your_image.jpg
  bio: >
    (optional) A brief multi-line introduction
  category: Faculty
  field: [CS, Systems...]  # comma-separated research fields

For Students and Researchers:

- name: Your Name
  homepage: (optional) https://your.website
  image: (optional) /files/images/avatar/your_fullname.jpg
  category: Student

Please upload your avatar image to /files/images/avatar/ and use that full path above. Please ensure your image is in square format and appropriately sized under 1MB for the best display.

For adding yourself as a new member, please include your supervisor's name in your PR description for verification. Without that, your PR may be delayed or rejected!

For Students and Researchers ordering: Since commit a92a4bc, for ease of maintenance, student categories no longer need to be sorted; Liquid will automatically sort them at deployment-time.

Updating Publications

Edit _data/pubs.yml and follow the existing format to add your publications. Basically, you will need to provide the following information for each publication:

- title: Title of the paper
  authors: name 1, name 2
  conf: conference name
  pub_date: "YYYY-MM-DD"
  url: url to the paper
  tags:
    - tag1
    - tag2

A explanation of the publication date: Only the year and month will be displayed, but you need to provide complete information for sorting purposes.

Managing Events

To manage events,

• Edit the _data/events.yml file, or
• Add new events directly to the "website" table in the shared "Fall 2025 DAP Lab Seminar" Google Sheet. They will be automatically synced into the YAML file at 9 AM EST every day.

Note: The Google Sheet method is temporarily disabled due to the low frequency of use after Sept. 9, 2025. Please edit the YAML file directly for now.

Local Development with Docker

This project uses Docker to provide a consistent development environment. Follow these steps to test changes locally:

Prerequisites

• Docker installed on your system
• Docker Compose (usually included with Docker Desktop)

Quick Start

1. Clone the repository (if you haven't already):

   git clone https://github.com/Columbia-DAP-Lab/Columbia-DAP-Lab.github.io.git
   cd Columbia-DAP-Lab.github.io

2. Start the development server:

   docker compose up --build

3. Access the site:

   • Open your browser and go to: http://localhost:8080
   • The site will automatically reload when you make changes to files
   • LiveReload is available at: http://localhost:35729

Development Commands

Start the site (with rebuild)

docker compose up --build

Start the site in the background

docker compose up -d

View logs

docker compose logs
docker compose logs --follow  # Follow logs in real-time

Stop the site

docker compose down

Restart after making changes

docker compose restart

Access the container shell (for debugging)

docker compose exec jekyll bash

Making Changes

1. Edit any file in the repository
2. The site will automatically regenerate (watch for changes in the logs)
3. Refresh your browser to see the changes
4. For _config.yml changes, restart the container:

   docker compose restart

Troubleshooting

Port already in use

If port 8080 is already in use, you can change it in docker-compose.yml:

ports:
  - "3000:8080"  # Use port 3000 instead

Container won't start

# Clean up and rebuild
docker compose down
docker compose up --build

View detailed build logs

docker compose up --build --no-cache