The RSLondonSouthEast 2024 Workshop
Celebrating its fifth year, the RSLondonSouthEast workshop returned to Imperial College London's South Kensington campus. Imperial's RSE team was well represented, with the event drawing RSEs and academics from across London and the South East of England. This year's conference was co-chaired by Jeremy Cohen, from Imperial, and Ilektra Christidi from UCL.
Research Software London (RSLondon) is a regional RSE community, seeking to bring together those involved in developing and using research software within the London and South East of England region. This includes anyone who writes code as part of their research, people in formal Research Software Engineering roles and, indeed, anyone with an interest in or involvement with research software. It aims to provide opportunities for networking and technical training through workshops, while also advocating for improved career models and opportunities for RSEs. The workshop continues to provide a welcoming and valuable platform for anyone involved in research software.
Keynote Presentation
Marion Weinzierl from the Institute of Computing for Climate Science at the University of Cambridge presented the Keynote for the workshop: "Leading from within the research technical professionals community". She told the story of how the RSE movement evolved from small grassroots groups to having national and international communities and a rapidly developing environment providing new career opportunities for RSEs.
Despite the RSE movement's successes, she emphasised that there was still work to be done. In a call to action, she illustrated the diverse ways in which individuals within the RSE community can lead. This could be through organising events, leading or contributing to a sub-community, becoming a mentor[^1], reviewing grants, finding like-minded people in working groups and special interest groups, or leading on a topic that they are passionate about, whether tech or non-tech related.
[^1]: Both SocRSE and WHPC provide mentoring programmes.
Regional Research Software Communities
This workshop is a great example of the value that can be provided by regional RSE groups. It gave the attendees the opportunity to connect with RSEs from other universities in the region. Below we've highlighted some people we met.
Sherman Lo is an RSE at Queen Mary University of London. Sherman has an interest in computational statistics and machine learning and facilitates GPU programming using CUDA.
Mahmoud Abdelrazek is a Senior Research Data Consultant at Advanced Research Computing Centre. He is interested in building flexible and scalable data pipelines.
Louise Bowler is a Senior RSE at King's College London. Louise has an interest in sustainable software and data science, both in academia and government.
Jamie Knight is an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow at the University of Sussex. For a number of years, he has been the maintainer and primary developer for GeNN ("GPU Enhanced Neuronal Network"), a library for simulating spiking neural networks on GPUs (and CPUs).
Sponsor Talks
Tony Chapman and Evelina Gabasova presented sponsor talks from UKRI-EPSRC and the Society of Research Software Engineering, respectively.
Panel discussion
Following the lunch break, a panel session was held - "Research Software Technical Professionals Showcase: Highlighting the contribution of technical roles in modern research" - where four of the panellists represented different areas of the developing digital Research Technical Professional (dRTP) field, with a fifth panellist providing the research funder perspective. The panel was chaired by Martin O'Reilly from The Alan Turing Institute and the five panellists and the areas they represented are listed below:
Mahmoud Abdelrazek, UCL (Research Data) Tony Chapman, UKRI-EPSRC (Research Funding) Arianna Ciula, King’s College London (Research Software Engineering) Gwen Dawes, University of Cambridge (Research Computing Infrastructure / HPC) Emily Lumley, Imperial College London (Research Engagement)
Questions were submitted to the panel using the web-based Slido tool, with questions appearing on the projector screen so that all audience members could see the questions that people wanted to ask. The panel covered a wide range of topics from areas including technical professional careers, increasing diversity and accessibility of the technical professionals community, working practices, improving engagement with the community and what the future holds for RSEs. The panel session sparked lots of interesting discussion and anecdotal feedback from audience members suggested that they found the panel discussion very interesting and useful.
RSE Team Presentations
Four members of the Imperial College RSE Team presented a talk or a poster. Each poster involved a 1-2 minute lightning talk introducing the poster and inviting the attendees to come and discuss the content in more detail during the poster session.
Adrian D'Alessandro presented a poster on The HPC and RSE Experience Programme, an initiative by the Imperial College Research Computing Service to provide an early career entry-point into RTP careers. The programme offers the opportunity to spend six-months working as an RSE within the Research Computing Service, and working alongside the HPC system administrators and user support staff. This presentation was taken as an opportunity to share the idea in the hope that other universities would also start similar programmes of their own.
Ryan Smith from the RSE Team and Chris Cooling from the Graduate School co-presented a talk on ReCoDE. ReCoDE is an online collection of research computing and data science exemplars, developed to enhance students' software engineering skills and provide robust, maintainable research software. Students develop the exemplars in collaborative projects with support from graduate teaching assistants and research software engineers. For a sample project in the field of Financial Data Science carried out by two of Imperial's RSE team members, Benjamin Scharpf and James Turner, see here.
Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal presented and poster on the R Development Guide, which is a resource designed to onboard new contributors to the R project, making the transition smoother and more accessible.
In the last talk of the day, Diego Alonso Álvarez, head of Imperial's RSE Team, presented data on the financial and environmental impact of excessive continuous integration usage. He offers easy low hanging solutions, and encourages us to be more selective on which GitHub action runners are used -- for example by removing redundant OS and software permutations. These ideas, as well as others discussed in a previous post, were the result of a critical exercise performed by the whole RSE Team, and the different measures, such as reducing the number of jobs or package caching, have been rolled out to most of the GitHub repositories managed by the Team. The associated poster received the Audience’s Best Poster award!
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