Welcome to the first of our monthly RSE Community Newsletters. If you find this interesting then please forward it to colleagues and collaborators! Feedback is also very welcome: please check the end of this message for contact details and ways in which you can get involved.
In this month’s newsletter:
RSLondonSouthEast 2019: RSLondon is a new regional initiative bringing together researchers who develop software. The first annual workshop will take place on Thursday 7 February at the Royal Society, featuring talks and posters from several members of Imperial, amongst other institutions. Further monthly events are planned - please join the mailing list to receive notifications.
CW19: Registrations are now open for this year’s Collaborations Workshop on 1-3 April which will feature workshops, discussions, a hackday and keynotes from Franziska Heine and Catherine Stihler.
RSE Association webinar: Christopher Cave-Ayland, Senior Research Computing Engineer at the University of Southampton, will present The Journey Matters More than the Destination – Python Weirdness with Metaclasses and Descriptors at 1pm on Wednesday 30 January
SRUK Scientific Computing Workshop: The Society of Spanish Researchers in the UK are running a free 1-day hands-on event on Saturday 9 March guiding participants through some first steps with scientific computing: what it can be used for, what tools are out there to automate tasks, the basic use of the terminal and of two of the most popular computer languages, R and Python. Registration will open soon.
CarpentryConnect: The first CarpentryConnect event in Europe in affiliation with The Carpentries and the SSI will be held in Manchester on 25-27 June. There is now an open call for topic suggestions and abstract submissions for breakout sessions, workshops, lightning talks and posters.
IC RSE Community: More information on this term’s activities will be announced shortly on our events page. In the meantime we’re keen to hear ideas on topics for potential lunchtime tutorial sessions, from software testing to machine learning or anything else: please get in touch using the address at the bottom of this message.
RSE @ Materials: The first RSE Community event of the year was held in the Department of Materials, with presentations by Laura Ratcliff and Lucy Whalley (slides). The event (which was open to all but focused on research software developed in Materials) was really well-attended and was followed by a discussion about how the participants thought their work could be better supported. If you’d like to host a similar event in your department then please get in touch!
ICHack 19: The biggest student-run hackathon in the UK took place at Imperial last weekend. Check their Twitter feed for highlights of the event
PyData London: The January meetup of the Europe’s largest data science community featured a talk by Imperial’s Michael Bronstein on Geometric Deep Learning. This group’s events are always oversubscribed but they cover a great range of topics and levels of Python experience. Another related group for anyone interested in data science is Central London Data Science Project Nights which is normally held on the St Mary’s Campus.
January saw updates from (amongst others!):
This month we’re highlighting effmass, Lucy Whalley’s Python package for the calculation of effective mass. This is domain-specific software but I’d recommend taking a look at its recent article in the Journal of Open Source Software. It demonstrates a great way to increase the visibility of your code and improve it in the process: JOSS ask experienced reviewers to assess the extent to which you’ve followed best-practice, and they make suggestions accordingly. See the Lucy’s slides (above) for more information. JOSS are now beginning to make partnerships with larger journals to assist with software reviews, so expect this to become more commonplace in the future.
That’s all for this month! Thanks to everyone who suggested links for this edition (names in italics above). If you’d like anything included in the newsletter, have ideas about how it could be improved, or would even like to guest-edit a future edition then just drop us a line at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
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This edition of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Mark Woodbridge