Happy New Year (just barely!) and welcome to the January issue of the Imperial College Research Software Community Newsletter! It might be the end of the month, but hopefully you are still riding that fresh-start energy, because in research software, every month is a chance to explore new tools, tackle emerging trends, or celebrate the brilliant work happening across the community.
Whether you are diving into 2025 with big resolutions or just resolving to keep your code running, we are here to give you an overview of what’s going on in the research software world, with our usual highlight of important dates, news and online resources. And, if you’re feeling the chill outside, let this newsletter warm you up with the latest updates. Enjoy!
The BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium 2025 is in April, supporting women and non-binary students in computing. If you know undergrads or taught master’s students, please encourage them to apply. The call for abstracts deadline is Monday, 3rd February 2025.
There are only a few tickets left for the “Imperial Lates: Weird Science” event, which will take place on Thursday, 6th February, from 18.00 to 21.00 at the South Kensington Campus. The event is free of charge and will be held in person. You can register at this link.
An exciting AI Hackathon is being organised by Rhodri Nelson, from the AI futurists, to bring together colleagues and collaborators interested in building and experimenting with AI tools and applications. This hands-on event will focus on the collaborative development of AI-driven tools, offering participants the chance to prototype new ideas or enhance existing projects with feedback and support, laying the foundation for future hackathons.
Event Details:
Around 5-6 project ideas will be initiated with small teams working on each. Contributions are welcome from coders, ideas people, and everyone in between, with the aim to create valuable, collaborative AI projects. Example projects might include adapting AI tools for different departments, building intuitive web-based APIs, or creating lightweight tools to simplify daily workflows. To propose a project, submit a brief description and your GitHub ID. Participation is open to all; curiosity and willingness to collaborate are key.
Spread the word to colleagues and collaborators who might be interested, and if specific resources like API keys or cloud access are needed, please let us know for planning. To join the hackathon, please sign up through this form. If you have any questions on this event please direct them to Rhodri Nelson or Francois van Schalkwyk. Looking forward to seeing your innovative ideas and collaborative spirit at the event!
The UNIVERSE-HPC project will hold its final Training Infrastructure Hackathon on Friday, 7th February 2025 at Imperial’s White City Campus and online. The aim of this Hackathon is to enhance training materials for essential and advanced skills (see existing topics here) for RSEs.
A seminar on “Managing complexity of Weather and Climate Code with diversity of skills and workflows” will take place on Thursday, 13th February 2025, from 13:00 to 14:00. This is part of the University of Cambridge’s RSE Seminars series.
The Imperial Research Computing Showcase Day will be held in April. If you want to share your experience and showcase the results made possible thanks to the Research Computing Services, you can send a one-page abstract to rcs-comms-team@imperial.ac.uk before Monday, 17th February 2025.
The EVERSE Network for Research Software Quality, a project dedicated to improving the quality of research software in Europe and beyond, will host its launch event on Tuesday, 18th February 2025, at 10:00 CET via Zoom. You can register at this link.
Our Research Software Community Coffee Hour meet-up will take place on Monday, 24th February 2025, from 10:30 to 11:30 in the Senior Common Room (SCR) at South Kensington Campus. Get in touch if you’d like to be added to the calendar invite for this and future sessions. Or simply drop by the SCR and look for the table with the Research Software Coffee Hour signs! Refreshments will be provided, with orders placed shortly after the session begins.
The first everywoman Tech Hub webinar of the year, “Tech on the Edge: Quantum, AI, and the Future of Innovation”, will take place on Tuesday, 25th February 2025 at 16:00 in London.
The deRSE25 - the Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany will be held from 25th–27th February 2025 at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe. This year, the conference is co-located with the German Software Engineering conference, (SE25).
RSECon25 will be hosted at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, from 9th-11th September 2025. Be sure to mark your calendars, and stay tuned for more information and registration details.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the College community helping to support research computing, we hear from Irufan Ahmed:
I’m excited to be back at Imperial as a Senior Research Software Engineer, 16 years after completing my undergraduate degree in Aeronautics. My interest in fluid mechanics led me to a PhD in computational combustion at Cambridge, where I developed a model to simulate combustion in spark-ignition engines. As part of this, I built an in-house Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code to study spherically expanding turbulent flames.
After my PhD, I worked as a consultant in the oil and gas industry, using CFD to simulate fires and explosions on offshore platforms. I then moved to Ricardo as a Senior Software Engineer, where I developed combustion models for a commercial CFD software used by automotive engine manufacturers. This role introduced me to professional software development, agile workflows, and product roadmaps.
Wanting to broaden my experience, I completed an MBA at Cambridge and took on roles in operations and product management. However, I was keen to return to engineering, which led me to the RSE role at Imperial. This position allows me to combine my software engineering background with my passion for fluid mechanics, while also working across a range of projects rather than focusing on a single niche area.
As an RSE at Imperial, I’ll be working on three open-source CFD codes in Aeronautics—PyFR, Nektar++, and Xcompact3D. My focus will be on understanding these codebases and contributing to their improvement and sustainability. I’m also eager to leverage my industrial experience to enhance these codes and help attract more industry users.
I started last month and am looking forward to contributing to these projects. A key part of my role is also training PhD students and research associates in good software engineering practices—something I wish I had known more about during my own PhD! I’m excited to be part of the RS community and look forward to connecting with others at Imperial.
This month, our Research Software of the month is grafify also available on CRAN:
grafify is an R package offering a quick-n-simple way to plot publication-ready graphs and perform ANOVA analyses with linear models (including mixed effects models). The package is an easy user-interface to ggplot2 and offers a range of graph customisations via arguments and avoids the need for many lines of code. This makes common tasks such as plotting data much easier so that researchers can spend more time ‘eye-balling’ and analysing their data than writing code. Those familiar with ggplot2 would know that it takes many lines of code to make bar graphs from factorial ANOVA data and even more to calculate error bars; grafify simplifies this to one line with options to plot SD, SEM or CI95 error bars, thus saving users much time and effort!
grafify can generate many types of graphs, including bars, boxplots, violins, distributions, residual plots, before-after plots, and randomised blocks. For inclusiveness, grafify only uses colourblind-friendly colour schemes - there are 12 discrete palettes and 5 continuous palettes to pick from. Advanced ggplot2 users who want to benefit from grafify can use exported functions to customise any ggplot2 object. This includes all colour schemes (scale_fill_grafify()and scale_colour_grafify()), theme_grafify() and plot_logscale() for easily generating images suitable for scientific papers, presentations, and reports.
Among the analyses options are consistent code interface for ANOVA (through lm() and lmer() functions) for ordinary and mixed effects linear models. Post-hoc comparisons are also easy to do (through emmeans() as the backend). An extensive user manual for graphs and analyses is available at the grafify vignettes website.
The future plan for grafify is to add functions and/or arguments to make routine graphing and analyses easier, and to create a shiny web app for non-R users.
If you use grafify, please cite: Shenoy, A. R. (2021) grafify: an R package for easy graphs, ANOVAs and post-hoc comparisons. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5136508.
The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2025 is scheduled as a hybrid event in May. Full details are available on the event website. Mini-workshop and lightning talk proposals can be submitted via this page.
Workshop Dates: 13th-15th May 2025
Venue: Stirling Court Hotel, University of Stirling.
Important Dates and Deadlines:
PyData London Conference 2025 is returning in June!
Conference Dates: 6th-8th June 2025
Tutorials Day: Friday, 6th June 2025
Talks: 7th-8th June 2025
Venue: Convene Sancroft, St. Paul’s, Paternoster Square, London
Tickets: Tickets are on sale NOW! Visit the website to secure your spot.
Important Dates and Deadlines:
Please consider submitting a talk or tutorial to the conference:
Sponsorship Opportunities are available. For more information, please contact tomara@numfocus.org.
The Software Sustainability Institute proudly supports The Turing Way, a community-driven open science project that empowers researchers. As the project seeks continued funding, they’re calling on the research software community to share testimonials. If you’ve collaborated with or benefited from The Turing Way, your experiences are vital for strengthening its case for future support and ensuring its continued success, so please share your story.
As we prepare to save the date for RSECon25, it’s worth noting that the Society of Research Software Engineering has made available talks, panels, and workshops from RSECon24 in a YouTube playlist.
The new season of Code for Thought has launched with two episodes so far: “ByteSized RSE: Gestalt and Data Visualisation” and “Software Kompetenzen in der Wissenschaft - die Tagung in Hannover, Dezember 2024” (in German).
You can hear the friendly voice of Peter Schmidt in another podcast: “UCL for Code in Research”. This companion podcast to the “Research Computing with C++” course from UCL’s Advanced Research Computing Centre offers valuable insights into C++ and is also a great resource for general listeners looking to learn more about the language and explore its potential applications.
The “Retrofitting spatial safety to hundreds of millions of lines of C++ ” post highlights how leveraging libraries can make your code more expandable and future-proof, without extensive rewrites. At least when new features are ABI-compatible, like these libc++ hardening modes.
In her follow-up blog post, “How to Get Funding By Caring About Research Software (II)”, Heidi Seibold resents case studies and practical strategies for securing research software grant funding.
There is always a need for quick, concise tips to improve Bash scripts. If you are short on time, consider checking out the “Better Bash Scripting in 15 Minutes” post.
If, like me, you have never heard of Sweave and Pweave, you can check out the blog post “Basics of Sweave and Pweave”. Sadly, it seems that Pweave is no longer under active development, but R is well supported through Sweave.
Is open-source software at risk due to service providers profiting from it without contributing back, as discussed in the maker-taker-problem)? The article “Open-Source Software Is in Crisis” explores into this issue and suggests potential solutions.
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 Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.