We are all experiencing a new way of living and we are for the most part working from home, in these COVID-19 times. Social distancing is the new mantra (and it is of paramount importance to follow it!). This is exactly when, as a community, we should get (virtually) together to share, support, encourage, ask, answer.
And the newsletter is here to remind us that there is an RS community in the College (but also others outside) and that there is much to do in terms of learning, supporting, helping each other. So here it is, with links, ideas, different means of communication (our Slack channel is available and growing) and things to do together, virtually and hopefully again in person soon.
For the most part, dates for events are provisional, so keep an eye on them in case they are postponed/rescheduled.
Stay safe!
The Imperial Research Software Community will be holding a weekly “virtual coffee” get-together. This begins on Wednesday 25th March and will continue weekly in the same time slot, Wednesdays at 3pm. You can find connection details on the Imperial RS Slack workspace or contact Jeremy Cohen.
On the 26th and 27th March the latest set of Software Carpentry workshops at Imperial on Bash, Git and Python will be held remotely using the Zoom conference tool. For information, please contact Katerina Michalickova.
This Saturday 28th March is SatRdays DC, a free one day R conference that showcases projects and packages from more than 20 speakers on topics including data visualization, sentiment analysis, interactive dashboards, economic analysis and cybersecurity. It will be live-streamed through Zoom here. Please note that the schedule is in the US EST timezone.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is launching the second round of the Frictionless Data Tool Fund. Apply for a mini-grant ($5,000) to build an open source tool for reproducible research using Frictionless Data tooling, specs, and code base. It is open to submissions until the 17th of May. The RCS is available to assist with applications.
If you are a Jupyter enthusiast, consider attending JupyterCon 2020 to be held on August 10–14 in Berlin, Germany. The call for proposals (tutorials, talks, sprints) will open soon. In the meantime, you can sign up as a proposal reviewer now.
The lecture of environmental scientist and Imperial alumna Jane da Mosto about the issues facing her home city of Venice on the 10th of March has been postponed until later this year. It was part of Imperial celebrating 70 years of its humanities programme. Check the event page for further updates.
Looking ahead:
The RS community has collected tips and hints about remote working. Check them out in this new blog post.
If you are looking for a beginner’s guide about front-end JavaScript frameworks, you can check the resource that the Research Software for Infectious Disease Epidemiology group has put together.
Chris Cave-Ayland (Senior RSE in the Research Computing Service) gave a presentation on Prototyping a hybrid cloud/on-premise CI/CD system for Nektar++ at the UKRI Cloud Working Group’s annual workshop on 3rd March.
OSCILOS is an open source code for simulating combustion instability. It is written in Matlab / Simulink and is very straightforward to run and edit. It can simulate both longitudinal and annular combustor geometries. It represents a combustor as a network of connected modules. It comes with an intuitive and easy-to-use graphical user interface.
OSCILOS is being developed by the research group of Professor Aimee Morgans, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College London, UK.
The latest version of OSCILOS is available from GitHub. Contributions are welcome and can be submitted with a GitHub pull request.
The Research Software Community is run by a committee of 8 volunteers. We’re always looking for new committee members to help bring new ideas, organise events, edit our newsletters and generally help in making the community work for its members. If you’d like to get involved, or you have any questions, contact Jeremy Cohen.
The community Slack workspace is available for members of the RS Community and RSEs based at nearby institutions. It was set up following discussions at December’s Winter Seminars event and you can join via this link.
The weekly clinics run by the Research Computing Service for all matters related to research computing are temporarily cancelled. Stay tuned for updates.
If you’re developing open source research software at Imperial then please consider submitting it to the Research Software Directory by either opening a pull request or dropping a line to Mark Woodbridge.
That’s all for this month. Thanks to everyone who suggested links for this edition.
Drop us a line with anything you’d like included in the newsletter, ideas about how it could be improved… or even offer to guest-edit a future edition! rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
If you’re reading this on the web and would like to receive the next newsletter directly to your inbox then please subscribe to our RSE Community Mailing List here.
This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.