And almost without noticing, we are already in May, the weather is consistently good and (hopefully!) you are planning exciting activities for the Bank Holidays, half term if you have children, and the summer time. On my part, I have started running again - not much, just 5 km every couple days. Much easier now than in January as a new year resolution since the weather then was miserable. It is interesting because those handful of minutes I spend running are incredibly useful to clear my mind, organise the work to be done and plan the day. I even manage to solve a few software issues in my mind as I dodge dog walkers, low tree branches and schoolchildren. Solving coding problems not only happens while you stare a a screen, there are plenty of opportunities along the day and you might find the clarity you need in the most unexpected places. So go out and explore other work spaces. It might surprise you what different places will help you to achieve. For now, you need a screen to find out all the interesting events, news and posts this month newsletter has to offer.
Registration for this year’s STEP-UP RSLondon Conference is now open, until the 12th of June. STEP-UP RSLondon 2026 will take place on Monday 29th June 2026 at The Francis Crick Institute. This year the conference is expanding further with contributions across research software, research data and research computing infrastructure topics.
King’s College London are hosting the UX Day for Higher Education 2026 on Thursday 14th May 2026. This event aims to bring together UX practitioners and strengthen connections across institutions within the UX space. Registration for the event is now open.
Registration is now open for RSECon26, the the 10th annual conference for Research Software Engineering, which will take place in Sheffield 9-11 September 2026. You have until the 31st of July to register for in-person attendance.
Likewise, the registration is open for the International Research Software Conference (IRSC26) which is co-located with RSECon in Sheffield, 7-8 September 2026, with a deadline on the 7th of August.
Early bird registration is now open for the EGI2026 conference, which will take place in the beautiful city of Ghent (Belgium) in 21-25 September 2026, bringing together professionals from science and scientific computing.
Our Research Computing at Imperial feature is taking a break this month but we’ll be back with more profiles of our community members over the coming months.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is Helix, Imperial’s new research data repository.
Helix is Imperial College’s new FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data repository. It supports publication of research data sets by academic staff and post graduate students. Helix is built on the InvenioRDM platform. InvenioRDM is the software that powers Zenodo and was chosen as a proven technology capable of scaling to large numbers of data sets and users. CERN is a key supporter of the project as well as hosting Zenodo. Imperial joins a number of research institutions in deploying our own instance. InvenioRDM is a Python framework built on top of Flask. It has a sophisticated architecture supporting scalable deployment, fast full text search, API access and DOI minting.
Our work with InvenioRDM has focussed on customising the metadata it stores for datasets, applying an Imperial look and feel and integrating with Imperial systems (like single sign-on and identity management). Another significant change was to support a mandatory data curation workflow managed by the Research Data Management team of the library. This requires all deposits to go through a manual review and approval process. Future planned functionality includes support for publishing large (multi-terabyte) datasets, sensitive datasets and capturing more sophisticated metadata about deposits.
Helix is now available for all Imperial research staff and students to deposit data collected or generated during research. The benefits of depositing your data with Helix include:
If you have any difficulties, please contact the team with feedback (rdm-enquiries@imperial.ac.uk). For additional information and support - including guidance on how to deposit and publish your data with Helix, and training resources, visit the About Helix webpage.
Last month, our colleague Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal published an analysis on “What have we learnt from the RSE journey so far”, where she crunches the RSE survey data from 2016-2022. Now she has been nominated for the RSE Data Competition, alongside other fine colleagues from the RS community. Please, have a look at the nominations and their work, and cast your vote by the 6th of May.
On 24 April Copilot started using interaction data for AI model training, including in private repositories, unless you actively opt out of it. You might want to DISABLE this option, to keep your and your collaborators data safe, or at the very least, review your Copilot settings in GitHub, to avoid surprises.
The carbon implications of the use of AI were known, but it seems things are gloomier than we though. A recent article has revealed that UK government vastly underestimated the climate impact of artificial intelligence and that this could be up to 100 times more! Moreover, different departments seem to have diverging goals on the use of AI, with contradictory forecasts on its environmental impact adding more confusion and uncertainty to the mix and the UK government plans for achieving Net-Zero by 2050.
The STEP-UP project’s mentoring programme is looking for mentees. If you, or anyone you know, would be interested in being paired with a mentor as part of this programme, sign up via the mentoring web page.
Another initiative from the STEP-UP project, the STEP-UP Placements scheme, is now looking for expressions of interest to undertake dRTP placements. There’s a wide range of information, including how to apply, on the STEP-UP Placements page.
Want to make your Python code fly? Try Profiling and Optimisation in Python! Is your Python code running slower than you would like? Do you want to make it run faster, but you’re not sure where to start? This blog post by Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal (Imperial College London) and Jost Migenda (King’s College London) summarises key learnings from the STEP-UP workshops on “Performance profiling and optimisation for Python”.
Two new podcasts are available this month in Code for Thought: the first one on having fun with float numbers - yes, really! - and the second one on how to make your data withstand the test of time.
An interesting short blog post from GitHub - Securing the git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution vulnerability - highlighting how a recent vulnerability around how git push options are processed was handled.
4 YAML Files Instead of PySpark: How We Let Analysts Build Data Pipelines Without Engineers describes an interesting approach for reducing the need for software development experience in a data processing pipeline.
A blog post from Software Heritage looks at The invisible code running the world (and who pays for it)!
Hot off the press from the StackOverflow blog - The Worst Coder in the World goes agentic: building a leaderboard cracking AI!
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:
The Research Computing and Data Science team at Imperial’s Early Career Researcher Institute run workshops in programming, statistics, data science, software engineering, Linux, HPC, AI for programming, LaTeX, and much more, which are available to the Imperial community. Follow the registration information on the RCDS page to sign up.
All the documentation, tutorials and howtos for using Imperial’s HPC are available in the Imperial RCS User Guide.
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 Diego Alonso Alvarez. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.