Hello and welcome to our October 2023 research software community newsletter. Some of you may be aware that October is an important month for open source software development - it’s time for the annual Hacktoberfest event! 2023 marks 10 years of Hacktoberfest. Did you participate in Hacktoberfest this year? Let us know via Slack! With term having started at the beginning of the month, the South Kensington campus is feeling like a very busy place again. I’m sure you’re also finding the same if you’re based at another Imperial campus. We hope you’ve all had a good start to the term and that all is going well for the members of our community who are involved with supporting students through teaching or training activities. This month we’ve got our usual mix of dates for your diary - we have various upcoming conference deadlines that may be of interest if you’re keen to publish your software-related research outputs. We also have our usual range of blog posts, articles, and news items for you to take a look at.
Byte-sized RSE is back! A new series of byte-sized RSE sessions is starting on Tuesday 7th November 2023 at 13:00 with a “How long will it take?” a session looking at techniques to estimate the amount of time required for a software development task. Further details and registration.
The Helmholtz Platform for Research Software Engineering (HiRSE) seminars continue with the next session taking place at 1pm GMT / 2pm CET on Wednesday 15th November 2023. Jessica Mitchell (FZ Jülich) will speak about “Docs-as-code: how to write documentation with developers”. The Zoom link will be advertised through various platforms, including UK RSE Slack. If you would like to attend and aren’t on any of the community platforms where this is advertised, you get in touch with the organisers to request connection details. Recordings of the HiRSE seminars are also made available on the HiRSE YouTube channel.
If you are a research software engineer or a researcher (including PhD candidates) who writes software, and you are from a systematically excluded group and you are interested in contributing to positive change in the research environment, check out this opportunity from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) to get involved in the Inclusive Research Software project at the Software Sustainability Institute. Deadline for applications is 10am, Friday 17th November 2023.
If you’re a PhD student the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE24) is accepting submissions for its Doctoral Symposium - the submission deadline is Wednesday 22nd November 2023.
ICSE24 is also hosting a wide range of workshops covering areas such as Quantum Software Engineering, Robotics Software Engineering, Responsible AI Engineering, and Search-based/Fuzz Testing. Workshop submissions are being accepted until 7th December 2023 (although please check individual workshop details to confirm the submission deadline if you’re planning to submit something).
UKRI’s call for new members for their Science, Engineering and Technology Board (SETB) and Strategic Advisory Teams (SATs) remains open until 24th November 2023. This is a great opportunity to help shape the future of research, and individuals in technical roles, such as Research Software Engineers, are eligible to apply. See the information page for further details on these opportunities.
The Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference (PASC24) takes place in Zurich in June 2024. This conference is a great opportunity to present your work to and engage with the international computational science community. The submission deadline for PASC 2024 paper submissions is 1st December 2023.
PyLadiesCon, an impactful event dedicated to fostering diversity, education, and empowerment within the Python community, takes place online from 1st to 3rd December 2023.
ACM FAccT 2024, the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency will be held in person in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from June 3rd to June 6th, 2024. One area of interest highlighted in the call for papers is System development and deployment. This theme covers “…work concerned with the development and deployment of algorithms, frameworks, models, systems and applications, with the goal of making them more fair, just, secure, privacy preserving, accountable, transparent and ethical”. For those interested in participating, abstract submissions are currently open, with the submission deadline set for 11th January 2024. See the call for papers for further details.
The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) has announced that Collaborations Workshop 2024 (CW24) will be held as a hybrid event from Tuesday, April 30, to Thursday, May 2, 2024. If you’d like to receive updates about the event, you can subscribe to the CW24 newsletter.
This month, we’re highlighting the RSE Competency Toolkit an open source project that we feel is important for the RSE community. It’s also something you can get involved with!
The Software Sustainability Institute’s annual Collaborations Workshop includes a Hack Day as part of its programme. Each year, a set of groups are formed and come up with ideas for tasks to work on as part of the hack day. At this year’s workshop, one group decided to work on a competency framework and toolkit for RSEs.
This open source RSE Competency Toolkit project has continued from the initial work undertaken at the hack day and is developing a web application to enable RSEs to track and manage their skills development.
A range of initial research has been undertaken to develop an understanding of RSE skills and how they can be linked and categorised. This is supporting the development of competency profiles for users of the platform alongside the curation of a range of training resources to help simplify access to the process of developing new technical skills. The work builds on a number of other current activities in the area of understanding and building training and learning pathways.
A wide range of work has already been undertaken on this project but there is still lots of scope to engage with the project and a range of areas where they’re looking for contributions.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/RSEToolkit/rse-competencies-toolkit
Example website (under development): https://rsetoolkit.github.io/rse-competencies-toolkit/
Take a look at the areas where you can contribute.
The Society of RSE is already hard at work organising RSECon24! If you are interested in getting involved, you can apply to join the Conference Committee. A full list of the committee roles is available. You can nominate yourself by completing the online Google form by the 7th November 2023. If you want to find out more about this opportunity, you can register here to attend a dedicated webinar on Thursday, 2 November 2023.
We’re planning a festive Imperial Research Software Community event in mid-December and are keen to hear from members of our community about the work you’re doing or, indeed, anything else Research Software Engineering-related that you’d like to present to the community. If you’d like to give a 5-minute lightning talk as part of this event, please get in touch with us at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk to express your interest. Further details will appear in next month’s newsletter but the event is likely to take place early in the week of Monday 18th December.
We’ve mentioned the Research Data Alliance / Research Software Alliance Working Group on Policies in Research Organisations for Research Software (PRO4RS) in previous newsletters. The Working Group is now up and running and you can join the group via the PRO4RS page on the RDA website. Joining the group will enable you to keep informed of its activities and to actively engage, providing comments and input if you’d like to. The group’s Case Statement is currently going through the RDA review and approval process and we’ll have further updates in future newsletters. A Working Group session was held at RDA Plenary 21 this month, as part of International Data Week 2023.
Following the Society of Research Software Engineering’s Annual General Meeting, which took place at RSECon23 in September, a group of new trustees, who were elected at the AGM, have joined the Society. You can see details of all the trustees on the Society’s Governance page.
The results of the ARCHER2 Image and Video Competition 2023 have been announced. You can also take a look at the full gallery of all submissions. We’d also like to highlight that if you use the ARCHER2 service in your work, the ARCHER2 User Survey 2023 is currently open.
As usual, we’d like to draw your attention to the new podcast episodes available in the Code for Thought series. In particular, we’d like to highlight two recent episodes - in the first, “Where is all the code Part 2: eScience Centre (NL) and Helmholtz (DE)”, Peter Schmidt looks at research software directories and, in particular, the directory developed by the Netherlands eScience Center and the customised version of this directory in use by Helmholtz. The second episode we encourage you to listen to is the first of a set of episodes on Diversity in Tech: Diversity in Tech Part 1: Women in HPC.
In her engaging blog post, “Updated software is valued software”, VanessaSaurus delves into a fundamental question: “What percentage of research software becomes dormant once it’s published”? She conducts a fascinating analysis of software repository activity post-publication.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics at Imperial College has launched a weekly podcast series that delves into public health research with prominent scientists. The 24th October episode, Tristan Naidoo - Learning from Twitter Data, focused on the utilisation of AI to analyse Twitter data, revealing insights into public health adherence.
The latest article on The Alan Turing Institute blog highlights “The importance of reproducibility in environmental science”. It discusses how the Environmental Data Science book, featuring a growing collection of peer-reviewed computational notebooks, can contribute to enhancing reproducibility within the field of environmental science.
The Carpentries, as outlined in this short blog post, has made the decision to retire its presence on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook. The rationale behind this move is a misalignment between the platforms’ actions and The Carpentries’ core values. Moving forward, The Carpentries’ social media engagement will exclusively occur on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and YouTube. For all the details, please refer to the blog post.
Selecting the appropriate technology for a specific task is a crucial aspect of data management. In some cases, opting for the easiest tool may not be the best choice. A recent article in The Register sheds light on a situation in which computer errors, poor technology choices, and flawed processes disrupted the recruitment of trainee anaesthetists in England and Wales.
The Imperial Research Software Community Slack workspace is a place for general community discussion as well as featuring channels for individuals interested in particular tools or topics. If you’re an OpenFOAM user, why not join the #OpenFOAM channel where regular code review sessions are announced (amongst other CFD-related discussions…). Users of the Nextflow workflow tool can find other Imperial Nextflow users in #nextflow. You can find other R developers in #r-users and there is the #DeepLearners channel for AI/ML-related questions and discussion. Take a look at the other available channels by clicking the “+” next to “Channels” in the Slack app and selecting “Browse channels”.
If you want to start your own group around a tool, programming language or topic not currently represented, feel free to create a new channel and advertise it in #general.
If you need support with your code, seek no more! The Central RSE Team, within the Research Computing Service is here to help. Have a look at the variety of ways the team can work with you:
All the documentation, tutorials and howtos for using Imperial’s HPC are available in the HPC Wiki pages. See also the Research Computing Service’s Research Computing Tips series for a variety of helpful tips for using RCS resources and related tools and services.
Imperial’s Research Software Directory provides details of a range of research software and tools developed by groups and individuals at the College. If you’d like to see your software included in the directory, you can open a pull request in the GitHub repository or get in touch with the Research Software Community Committee.
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.
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This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Jeremy Cohen. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.