As the days grow shorter and cooler, we are reminded that the year 2024 is about to end. London is already boasting its Christmas lights and the festive Christmas markets. Parts of London also experienced a minor snowfall on one fine morning this November (It was definitely quite exciting for me to see snowfall for the first time!) The end of November is a chance to slow down, reflect, spend time with friends and family, maybe enjoy a warm soup on a frosty afternoon! While you do so, please spare a few minutes to read this edition of our newsletter - to get a glimpse of what is happening in the RSE and its sister communities.
Call for proposals for the FOSDEM 2025 Open Research room is open. FOSDEM 2025 will be entirely physical in Brussels on the 1st and 2nd February 2025, and an online session will be held unofficially a few weeks later. Proposals due 1st December 2024 (AoE).
PyData Global 2024 will be a 3-day virtual conference from 3rd-5th December 2024. If you are interested to attend, please buy your tickets.
Call for submissions for conference sessions and poster presentations for ARMA 2025 are now open. ARMA, the Association of Research Managers and Administrators, represents people in a range of different roles, including some that extend towards the research engagement and technical professional space. For example, one of the conference’s themes is the use of AI in areas such as research management and grant writing. ARMA 2025 will take place from 17th-19th June 2025 in Edinburgh. Due date to submit abstracts is 6th December 2024.
Registrations are open for Episode 3 “Opening Up Research Code” of the “Enabling Open Science Through Research Code” online series being jointly organised by RSSE Africa and RSE Asia Association This episode is scheduled for 12 Dec 2024, 8:30-10 UTC. Registration is free and open to all.
On Tuesday 17th December 2024, 15:00-17:00, the STEP-UP project, in collaboration with Imperial’s research software community and the RSLondon community will be hosting a pre-holidays Research Technical Professionals get-together. Join us for some short talks to celebrate the many RTP-related activities that have been taking place over the last year, followed by an opportunity to network and chat with colleagues and friends, old and new, over snacks, mulled wine (or tea/coffee) and mince pies! Everyone is welcome, from Imperial and beyond, whether you’re an active member of the research software community or not. Please register here to attend the event. We hope to see you on the 17th December.
Call for posters for Supercomputing Asia 2025 (SCA25) are now open. SCA25 is a fully in-person event which will be held in Singapore from 10th-13th March 2025. The 1-Page Extended Abstract Submission is due on 13th January 2025 (AoE).
Registrations are open for a webinar on High-Performance Computing and Software Sustainability: Toward Green Software Development organised as a part of the HPC Best Practices Webinars. It will be hosted online on 15th January 2025, from 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST. Participation is free, but registration is required.
Speaker and Workshop Host Applications for EARL (Enterprise Applications of the R Language) 2025 are now open. The EARL 2025 conference will be held in Brighton, UK from 14th-16th October 2025. The closing date for the submission of abstracts is 28th February 2025.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the College community helping to support research computing, we hear from Sahil Raja:
I am currently a Junior Software Engineer in the central Research Software Engineering (RSE) team at the Imperial. I started this role just under a year ago, contributing to a range of projects within the RSE team. I have a background in computer science, having earned my bachelor’s degree from Brunel University. During my final year, I developed an indoor asset tracking system, using a Raspberry Pi as a Bluetooth scanner to track BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacons within a designated area. My primary contributions were creating the user interface for the application and developing a software interface for the scanner. Through this project, I gained valuable knowledge about wireless signals and their use in approximating locations based on Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values.
Since joining the RSE team, I have significantly expanded my understanding of how researchers approach software development and the best practices involved. When I joined, my experience was primarily with Java, JavaScript, and Python. Over the past year, I have had the opportunity to work on key projects such as QwikApp, Paricia, and the software for the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). All of these projects are written in Python, using Django, and helped in my learning progress.
I am always keen to learn and took on the challenge of studying a new programming language, eg. Rust. While I found it quite difficult at first, the experience has been rewarding. My learning was accelerated by working on an active project, MUSE_2.0, which is written in Rust. This hands-on involvement made the learning process both challenging and highly educational.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is Paricia, developed in the Civil Engineering Department.
Paricia is a hydroclimatic data management system. Originally focused on managing data from stations in the Andes region and based on the iMHEA platform - Platform for the Regional Hydrological Monitoring of Andean Ecosystems Initiative - it has recently been generalized to be able to ingest data from anywhere in the world.
The project is coordinated by Prof. Wouter Buytaert, who leads a group in the Civil Engineering Department that focuses on the impact of environmental change on the water cycle and its consequences for managing water resources. This work involves gathering and processing time-series data like water level, flow and temperature from various monitoring stations based in mountainous areas such as the Andes and Himalayas.
Paricia uses Django as the web framework, with Bootstrap5 for the frontend, and Timescale as the database, specialised in the efficient handling of large timeseries datasets. The new version of Paricia, among many improvements in terms of software quality assurance tools, testing and code architecture, includes the support for arbitrary timezones, a robust permission system to enable different levels of visibility for the data and other objects, and progressive zooming of the plots, using Dash/Plotly, for a more fluid user experience when visualising datasets with millions of points.
Check the documentation for more details on its features as well as the live version (not for production).
On November 12th 2024, we celebrated the last two development rounds of ReCoDE! The GTAs showcased their projects which ranged from topics like “Robot hand-eye coordination” to “Exploration of Mandelbrot set including visualisation tools”. You can find the project exemplars and read more on the ReCoDE project website.
S7 v0.2.0 is on CRAN! S7 is a new object-oriented programming (OOP) system for R, collaboratively designed to supersede both S3 and S4. Learn more in the post on the tidyverse blog
Discover the benefits of version control using Git and how in combination with GitHub, it can lead to better and efficient management and collaboration, in this mini-tutorial style blog post on Git and GitHub for efficient project management and collaboration published on our Research Software Engineering team’s blog page. This mini tutorial was delivered by Dr Diego Alonso Álvarez to the current cohort of the ReCoDE project.
Did you know that the Early Career Research Institute at Imperial offers courses on Research Computing & Data Science for upskilling and professional development? There are a number of courses on offer to enhance your software engineering skills, get an introduction to Git and GitHub, and for the more ambitious, there is also a course that takes you further with Git and GitHub. There are also introductory programming courses in various languages - if you have heard about the Julia programming language and wondered where to start learning it, there is an Introduction to Julia course too!
Why does writing reproducible code matter and how might you as a researcher get started on this journey toward reproducible research? This is discussed in a recent blog on Why should you care about reproducible code — and how to get started? published by the Software Sustainability Institute (originally published on the Netherlands eScience Center Medium page.).
The blog post Microsoft Copilot: From Prompt Injection to Exfiltration of Personal Information describes some vulnerabilities in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
If you want to see an example of why thinking about security, use cases and the environment in which your application will run is very important then, here is blog post on Hacking Kia: Remotely Controlling Cars With Just a License Plate that talks about a set of vulnerabilities discovered in Kia vehicles that allowed remote control over key functions using only a license plate.
Are you looking for a tool for transparent file encryption in git? Explore git-crypt, which enables transparent encryption and decryption of files in a git repository. This means you can make your code public, while keeping secrets such as passwords and API keys hidden from outside contributors.
UNIVERSE-HPC has published a new guide aimed at helping educators and trainers deliver successful pilot workshops. Find out more about this new training pilot operations guide.
Are you interested in contributing to R core? Consider reaching out and getting involved with the R Contribution Working Group (RCWG). This working group aims to encourage new contributors to R core, with a focus on diversity and inclusion. The RCWG meet (on Zoom) every 1-2 months, usually alternating between the third Friday of the month, 15:00 UTC and the third Tuesday of the month, 19:30 UTC (-1hr during Daylight Savings Time in Europe).
Recently the Code for Thought podcast released its episode on Champions for Change in research: Imperial College London and Cambridge University highlighting two different champion schemes: one for research software at Imperial College London, and one for research data at Cambridge University. Dr Jeremy Cohen and Dr Michael Bearpark from Imperial and Clair Castle, Dr Sacha Jones and Dr Lutfi Ben Othman from Cambridge University joined the podcast as guests.
On a recent Developer Stories podcast, Dan Reed, Professor emeritus of the University of Utah shared his thoughts on the The Future of High Performance Computing and how to think about the resource shortages that are resulting from the AI boom.
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 Imperial RCS User Guide. 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.
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 Research Software Community Mailing List.
This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.