LaTeX: mark TODOs in your drafts

When I work on an article, or bookchapter, or any text in LaTeX really, it is often nice to mark areas where you still have to fix something. Maybe something needs to be explained in more detail, or it has to be better motivated, maybe a reference needs to be included.

One way is to use some tag, like @TODO, in your text, and then if you want to see what still needs to be done, search for that tag. But personally I like for this to do to also be visually easy to be found. As most articles are in black-and-white, for print, the use of some colour is a nice way to do this. So here’s my code. Perhaps it’s useful for you too. It is also a nice simple example of how you can make your own commands in LaTeX :)

    \usepackage{color}
    \newcommand{\todo}[1]{\textcolor{red}{@TODO: #1}}

You can see I kept the tag, so I can also easily search for it in the PDF. That’s all! Now you can use it like this:

    \todo{this part really needs to be rewritten...}

Resulting in:

@TODO: this part really needs to be rewritten…

AlphaWoW wins BrainGain demo award

BrainGain is a Dutch research consortium consisting of researchers, companies and potential users of BCIs and CBIs. It is financed by the Smart Mix Programme of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs
and the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, to support applied research.  It started in 2007 and will continue for 6 years in total.

Each year there is a consortium meeting bringing all partners together, so everybody is kept up to date of all the developments, new collaborations can be initialized, etc. At these meetings, also awards are presented for best poster, press, and demo.

For 2009, the demo award went to us for alphaWoW, “as it represents a promising industrial direction of adding a BCI-based channel to existing technologies that cannot be realised in any other way.” It is really awesome to receive such recognition. Thank you BrainGain!

In 2008, we also got the demo award, but then for BrainBasher, a simple fun game controlled with imaginary or actual movements, requiring only 10-15 minutes of training.

AlphaWoW at TEDxAMS!