Happy New Year, and welcome to the first newsletter of 2024. And Happy Birthday Imperial College Research Software Community Newsletter! In fact, the first issue was published on the 30th of January 2019. It took me until November of the same year to write my first one, so I’ll wait a bit more before celebrating my anniversary.
I believe this is a great achievement for our community. In those 5 years, many things happened, including a pandemic, but this monthly appointment has always been there for us all. To highlight events, news, resources, and opportunities, but, more importantly, to give a sense of belonging to the people working with software at Imperial and provide a nice place to get to know people and research tools that are really what this community is about.
So, once again, relax and have a look at what’s going on in the research software world.
The annual conference of the German RSE community (deRSE) is scheduled from 5th-7th March 2024 in Würzburg, Germany. Remember, the registration deadline for deRSE24 is 1st February 2024.
Reproducibility for Everyone (R4E), a community-led education initiative to increase adoption of open research practices at scale, will host a virtual interactive workshop about science reproducibility on 1st February 2024. The focus is not software reproducibility per se, as it considers practical experiments in general, but software tools are a big part in documenting and managing any type of workflow. Registration is open.
State of Open Con24, the UK’s Open Technology Conference covering Open Source Software, Open Hardware, Open Data, Open Standards, & AI Openness, will be held in London on 6th-7th February 2024. Tickets are available.
Be a part of the upcoming ARCHER2 Celebration of Science event happening in Edinburgh on 7th-8th March 2024. Ensure your spot by completing the registration; attendance is free of charge. The registration deadline is 29th February 2024.
The FAIR Implementation Workshop - Assessing national current FAIR-enabling capabilities will take place on 14th May 2024. Secure your spot by confirming your registration. Quick reminder: Workshop registration is both free and mandatory.
And a few reminders of events we highlighted last month…
A reminder that FOSDEM 2024, the free open source developer event, is taking place in Brussels over the weekend of the 3rd and 4th February 2024. A number of open source projects have stands at this year’s event and there is the usual array of “developer rooms” run by individual projects or covering general topics where a variety of talks, coding and discussions take place. The event attracts over 8000 developers and you don’t even need to register - just turn up!!
EURO-PAR 2024, the 30th International European Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, is set to take place in Madrid from 26th to 30th August 2024. Ensure you mark your calendar for the 5th March 2024, the deadline for abstract submissions. Full papers are required just under three weeks later.
The registration for the Collaborations Workshop 2024 (CW24) is now open! The event will take place from the 30th April to the 2nd of May as a hybrid event, with the in-person venue in Warwick. The themes for CW24 are Environmental Sustainability, AI/ML tools for science and Citizen Science.
This month, in our series highlighting key members of the College community helping to support research computing and research software services, we hear from Dr Tom Bland:
I’m a member of the central Research Computing Service at Imperial, having joined in October. I’m currently here as part of a 6-month experience programme for post-PhD researchers to develop skills in software development and HPC management.
Before coming to Imperial, I completed a PhD at the Francis Crick Institute in London in the field of Biophysics & Cell Biology, specifically looking at self-organisation in developing embryos. My work here was split roughly 50/50 between the lab and the computer. In the lab, I focussed mainly on gene editing and microscopy using the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. At the computer, my work included machine-learning for image analysis and PDE modelling on an HPC cluster, both of which were a real highlight for me.
Approaching a crossroads in my career after my PhD, I decided that I enjoyed the academic research environment, but wanted to focus more on the software side of things and ‘professionalise’ my computational skills. I came across this position at Imperial which seemed like the perfect opportunity to do just that.
Since joining Imperial I’ve been able to work on many interesting and varied projects. With the HPC platforms team I’ve been working to benchmark scientific software on a new upgraded HPC system, learning all about parallel programming and optimising software performance. With the RSE team I’ve worked on projects ranging from electrical grid models to climate data management, learning many useful tools such as Docker for containerised workflows and GitHub for project management and collaborative coding. Most of all, I’ve learnt that software development is far more effective (and fun) when it’s a team effort!
We don’t have a Research Software of the Month to highlight this month.
But we’d love to showcase your work! If you’re actively developing a piece of research software or have come across something interesting with an Imperial link, why not share it with the community? Your recommendations matter! Even if the open source software you’re using in your research doesn’t have a link to Imperial, but you think it’s something we should all know about, let us know.
As a community, it’s crucial that we actively participate in conversations and initiatives aimed at fostering a more inclusive research software landscape. Recently, Jeremy Cohen provided a thoughtful summary of key insights from the DiveRSE series talk on Improving Diversity and Inclusion in the Research Software Engineering Community for the Society of Research Software Engineers blog. This is definitely a must-read for those interested in contributing to a more diverse and welcoming research software environment.
The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) has unveiled its 2023 Community Report, summarizing all the key highlights and achievements from the past year. You can find the complete report on Zenodo.
Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) in partnership with the Netherlands eScience Center have launched a new self-assessment tool to promote FAIR research software. Take a look at ARDC’s news article on this project to read more about the tool and have a go with it yourself.
Mapping the impact of software in science, is a blog post from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative reporting on a 2023 hackathon looking at this topic.
HackMD is a collaborative Markdown editor that supports real-time collaboration across multiple platforms. For current or future HackMD users, this blog post guides you on How to sync your notes to GitHub.
Check them out!
Do you want to hear stories about the health and sustainability of the open source community? Then Sustain is the podcast for you. There are more than 200 episodes available and counting. Among the most recent ones Episode 214: Dr. Laura Dornheim on Munich’s open source journey and Episode 216: Mohammed Shah on TOS Violations for Open Source Projects.
Increase citations, ease review & foster collaboration is a practical Jupiter book focusing on ‘easy wins’ for achieving top-tier reproducibility in machine learning research. This guide aims to enhance the quality of scientific contributions, making it easier for fellow researchers to use and build upon.
With AI now capable of generating code, including pull requests, we anticipate a significant rise in technical debt. However, could AI also hold the key to resolving this issue? Explore varying perspectives in the Stack Overflow Blog post, Self-healing code is the future of software development.
If you wonder if it’s possible to run macOS code on your Linux machine, the answer is ‘yes’ for console programs and ‘almost’ for graphical applications, thanks to Darling. In essence, while Wine is tailored for Windows, Darling focuses on macOS. Learn more about it at the Darling project’s website and explore how it brings macOS functionality to your Linux environment.
AI and robotics are hot topics, and it’s no surprise that numerous videos showcase robotics systems performing impressive tasks. But is what we see exactly what’s happening? That Awesome Robot Demo Could Have a Human in the Loop How to tell whether a robot is being teleoperated offers an intriguing analysis of teleoperation in robotics and provides insights on how to identify if a seemingly autonomous robot is, in fact, being teleoperated.
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 Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.