Hi everyone and welcome to our March 2025 edition of Imperial’s Research Software Community newsletter. In a month where the development and addition of AI tools into everyday software continues apace, Opera announced their “AI Browser Operator”, helping you to get tasks done in your browser, and Amazon has revamped Alexa to include generative AI! Away from AI, we are pleased to welcome a new member to our committee this month and they will be helping the team to continue to bring you this monthly newsletter as well as helping us to organise some events and training opportunities over the coming months (see the “News” section for your opportunity to tell us what sort of training opportunities you’d like to see available). We’re still keen to add another couple of members to our committee so do get in touch if you’re interested. We have lots of resources for you to check out this month and, as we approach the late-spring/summer conference season, some opportunities to submit abstracts to speak at a variety of software and High Performance Computing-related events - read on to find out more!
Do you work with ARCHER2? The ARCHER2 Celebration of Science will take place in Edinburgh on the 14th-15th May 2025. Registration is open and is free of charge.
The Digital Humanities & Research Software Engineering Summer School 2025 will take place 30th June-3rd July 2025 at King’s College London. Places are limited and the deadline for applying to attend the Summer School is Tuesday 22nd April. An information session for anyone thinking of applying to attend is being held on Monday 14th April, 10-11am.
The Sustainable Supercomputing Workshop will take place on Friday 13th June in Hamburg, Germany, co-located with ISC High Performance 2025. There is currently a call open for abstract submissions for lightning talks at this workshop - the submission deadline is Friday 18th April 2025.
As we highlighted last month, PyCon UK 2025 will take place in Manchester, UK on the 19th-22nd September 2025. The call for proposals for talks, interactive workshops and collaborative sessions is now open and the deadline for proposals is Sunday 11th May 2025.
A new ARCHER2 training course on Green software use on HPC will be taking place, in person, on Tuesday 13th May 2025. Registration is open.
Registration is still open for the Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2025. This is a hybrid event taking place 13th-15th May 2025. As in previous years, the final day of the event, 15th May, is a hackday where there will be the chance to work with a group of other attendees on a fun, technical project. The event is hybrid, taking place at the Stirling Court Hotel, University of Stirling, and online.
The 17th International Workshop on Science Gateways (IWSG2025) will take place at the University of Westminster on the 17th-19th June 2025. Registration will open soon.
And finally…a reminder to save the date (and check out the call for abstract submissions) for RSECon25 that is taking place in Coventry, UK, at the University of Warwick from Tuesday 9th to Thursday 11th September 2025. The call for submissions for talks, walkthroughs, workshops and posters is open and the submission deadline is 23:59 BST on Friday 25th April.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from James Turner:
I started at Imperial back in April ‘23 as a Senior Research Software Engineer in the central RSE team within the Research Computing Service, having moved from the University of Sussex. My background is in computer science and artificial intelligence, and my PhD years were spent studying stability and numerical error propagation in realistic spiking neural network simulations.
As a postdoc, I moved on to neuromorphic machine learning and computer vision, where I developed tools for converting traditional neural networks to run on fancy new spiking hardware and ultra-low latency event-based cameras, studying the strengths and limits of this new ‘neuromorphic’ paradigm. I also developed a method for creating automatically labelled neuromorphic vision datasets using 3D printed props, event-based cameras and a 3D tracking system.
Software and hardware prototyping is the ultimate freedom to me. Since great ideas in isolation are missed opportunities, my passion is in taking these ideas and prototypes from science and implementing them as open, maintainable, sustainable and industry-standard software/hardware that can actually be used for years to come.
Are you interested in how you can improve the quality of your research software? Would you like to know more about how you can extend your use of research software best practices? This month, our regular Research Software of the Month feature is again taking a break but instead, in its place, we’re highlighting the Research Computing Service RSE team’s Code Surgeries.
Who’s behind the RSE Code Surgeries?
If you have any challenges or wishes for your research code or your software development skills, the Central RSE Team can probably help you, for free, via the Code Surgeries… but who are the people behind the initiative? Today we start highlighting the people who will be there supporting your software requirements skills, so you can get a better idea of how we can help you.
And the first three are…
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Would you like to see your software tool or application featured in Research Software of the Month? The research software community team are always on the look out for interesting software tools developed at, or with a link to, Imperial. Feel free to reach out to us with your suggestions for RSotM at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
In collaboration with the UKRI-EPSRC-funded STEP-UP Strategic Technical Platform project, we’ll be running a variety of training across different skill levels over the coming months. Rather than simply selecting and running a set of training courses, we’re keen to understand what training you’d like to have access to. You can tell us, anonymously, via our Training Requirements Form. If you’d like to discuss training with us, you can get in touch with the Research Software Community committee via our usual address - rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
The Software Sustainability Institute has announced a new £4.8m Research Software Maintenance Fund, supported by the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme. The fund will offer awards that can be used to support and maintain an existing piece of software, or to support teams working on multiple software tools. You can find full details on the Research Software Maintenance Fund web page. The first funding round will open for Expressions of Interest on 7th April 2025.
Do you define yourself as being from an underrepresented group within the research software community? If you have also written software or scripts for research purposes, would you be interested in participating in a study exploring the barriers and enablers to developing research software for underrepresented groups? If so, you can find out more about the study and how to get involved on the inclusive RSE study web page.
Did you attend this year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels at the start of February? Whether you attended or not, take a look at Deborah Udoh’s excellent blog post on her first experience of attending FOSDEM in person (and almost not making it!).
Supporting the reproducibility of your research software does not need to be complex. While writing good quality and sustainable research software can be a daunting task if applied in full, just a few simple steps can go a long way in terms of ensuring reproducibility. Have a look at the Mini-guide to Reproducible Python code and learn, in a few minutes, the low hanging fruit easy to pick by anyone.
The third series of Byte-sized RSE concluded with two final sessions in March on “Green computing with green algorithms” and “AI-assisted coding”. As usual, a companion podcast accompanies each session. You can listen to ByteSized RSE: What’s the carbon footprint of my app? right now, and look out for the podcast accompanying the AI-assisted coding session which will be available in the next few days on the Code for Thought podcast. Also released at the start of March is the companion episode for the “Project Management with GitHub” session
We’ve previously highlighted some of the important work that Dave Horsfall has been doing around mental health and wellbeing within the RSE community. As a 2025 SSI Fellow, Mike Simpson is building on Dave’s work and has published a blog post on Supporting Mental Health in the Research Software Community.
Git 2.49 was released in mid-March with a range of updates and features - GitHub’s blog post Highlights from Git 2.49 provides an overview of all the updates!
Meet the European Space Agency’s robots at the “Moon on Earth” LUNA facility in Cologne, Germany in the ESA’s fascinating Making a Moon robot show on Earth blog post.
Also with a robotics theme, from NVIDIA’s developer blog - Announcing Newton, an Open-Source Physics Engine for Robotics Simulation.
Fabrication has started for Google’s OpenTitan, open source Root of Trust (RoT) hardware. A really interesting read and project if you’re interested in open source silicon/hardware.
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.
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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.