As August comes to a close, we are very close to starting the new academic year. We hope you have had a good summer and are ready for the new term ahead. In this month’s newsletter, we have some interesting dates for your diary, news and blogs from the research software community.
Enjoy the content we have for you this month and, as always, feel free to reach out to the Imperial Research Software Community committee at rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk if you have any questions or ideas for community activities.
There’s still just time to register for online attendance at this year’s Research Software Engineering Conference - RSECon26. Registration for online attendance closes on Monday 31st August and the conference takes place from Wednesday 9th to Friday 11th September 2026.
As part of the LMU Open Science Summer School 2026, Dr Jonas Hagenberg will be presenting an online session on Readable Code on Thursday 10th September 2026, 08:00-08:45 UK time. This free virtual lecture is open to anyone interested in strengthening their skills in writing clear, understandable, and maintainable code. It is one of a series of free public lectures covering topics around reproducibility, repeatability and open science between the 7th and 11th September. Registration for the free public lectures is required.
The German research software community (de-RSE) are holding their annual de-RSE Collaborations Workshop with the theme “Collaborating for the Future of Research Software Engineering”, 23rd-25th September 2026 in Göttingen. This event is directly preceded by a Workshop on AI-supported Research Software Engineering on Tuesday 22nd and Wednesday 23rd September 2026 at the same venue. Registration for both events (in-person only) closes very soon on Monday 31st August 2026.
Registration for the ReproducibiliTea 2026 conference is open. This is a one-day conference taking place online on 25th September 2026, 10:00-18:45. It marks ten years of momentum behind the push for reproducibility in research. The programme covers the problems the field still faces, how the community has been tackling them, and the grassroots efforts that keep driving change.
Applications are now open for the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship Programme 2027 (submission deadline: Monday 5th October 2026). The Fellowship Programme funds researchers, research software engineers, and advocates who want to improve computational practice in their field. The programme is open to applicants at any career stage and from any background, from PhD candidates and junior research software engineers to professors and directors of research computing, including those without a formal software background who support research, training, or research infrastructure.
The Research Data Alliance Plenary is coming to London! The RDA’s 27th Plenary Meeting (P27) will take place in person at the Kia Oval in London, from the 6th-8th October 2026, hosted by UKRI. Standard event registration is open.
In this month’s Research Computing at Imperial feature, we’re featuring Moi Nicholas:
Hello, I’m Moi. My academic background is in Genetics, but I have since moved towards a more general RSE focus.
I was first introduced to the command line and HPCs during my undergraduate degree at Leicester, where I processed DNA methylation data and provided taxonomy classifications for previously unclassified bacteriophages as part of a now-automated pipeline. Research computing was a big part of my subsequent PhD, which focused on analysing single-cell transcriptomic data. I built a simple R package to predict the extent of development in human cell samples and used Python to modify a generative machine learning architecture to model novel cell development pathways in silico.
Currently, I am in my second month with the Central RSE team here at Imperial as part of an eight-month experience programme at RCS. My first assignment has been to assist a team of data analysts who work with Virtual Ecosystem. My role here is to help develop a workflow to run a sensitivity analysis on the HPC, as well as ensuring that it is accessible to all members of the data analysis team.
I will soon head to RSECon26, where I hope to expand my knowledge and understanding of all things RSE.
When I get back, I’ll be moving over to the Platforms team, where I’ll get more involved in helping users with the day-to-day challenges they face when working with the HPC clusters. Part of this role will involve writing documentation to help users be more effective in their use of the HPC clusters and avoid the most common difficulties.
This month, we are proud to advertise the launch of the Imperial’s new Research Software Directory.
imperial.software is Imperial College London’s new home for research software. Built on the open-source platform initiated by the Netherlands eScience Center and co-developed with Helmholtz, this is a battle-tested, world-class solution already trusted by hundreds of organisations and over 2,600 contributors globally in other deployments. Imperial’s Research Software Directory is a new service maintained by the central Research Software Engineering team, within the Research Computing Service.
Whether you’re a researcher or software engineer, here’s what’s in it for you:
👉 Explore now at imperial.software (and if you’re a member of Imperial staff, why not add your software to the directory!)
The successful applications to the second round of the Research Software Maintenance Fund (RSMF) have just been announced. Is your project among them? Check the list, because you might find useful tools for your research that you want to get involved with.
The Carpentries have announced Upcoming Changes to The Carpentries’ Curriculum Program. This includes planned renewal of the core curricula and adjustments to other elements of the program.
On 1st September 2026, the Software Sustainability Institute will reveal a new brand identity and name. This change is to recognise the growth of the research software field and the evolving role of the institute over the last 15 years. Read more in the announcement: A new identity for the Software Sustainability Institute
rpubs.com, quartopub.com, and shinyapps.io are sunsetting in favour of a unified publishing solution connect.posit.cloud. Details are in the announcement.
In the blog post “Provenance in the age of AI: Why we need AI Declarations for more transparency”, Faruk Diblen from the Netherlands eScience Center looks at the challenge of transparency and sustainability of code and data in the era of AI and how this can be addressed.
The hardware where software runs matters, but often we do not pay enough attention to it, especially in the context of sustainable computing. The new guide, Hardware-Conscious Programming: Designing Sustainable Code for the Present and the Future, helps with that, offering actionable steps to help your software make better use of the available hardware.
If you’ve done any work around accessibility of web content, you’ll know that providing high-quality “alt text” is an important element of building an accessible website. But once your site gets bigger, how can you effectively check that all you images have good quality alt text? Take a look at the recent article on the GitHub blog “Your alt text passes automated checks. That doesn’t mean it’s any good”.
Google DeepMind recently published a short blog post on “Piloting the world’s first double-blind AI evaluations”.
Linking the world’s research to the code it runs on: A recent blog post from OpenAlex, the open catalogue of research outputs. This post introduces work, funded by Schmidt Sciences, that OpenAlex will be doing in collaboration with University of Texas at Austin to make research software a first-class entity within the graph of research outputs.
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 how-tos 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 Imperial. Please, submit your software and help increase its visibility and impact. If you have any questions, get in touch with the Imperial’s Research Software directory maintainers.
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 Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.