by Pip Grylls, University of Warwick

The Research Software Engineering (RSE) Midlands 2024 Annual Conference was held
at the University of Warwick on March 7, 2024. Generous support from the Society of
Research Software Engineering and the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology,
based in Warwick’s Department of Statistics, enabled us to welcome over 40 delegates
from across the Midlands.

The RSE community at Warwick has expanded recently, with several new RSEs joining
in the last 18 months. We have endeavoured to identify individuals in RSE and RSE-related
roles across the University. The RSE Midlands 2024 event helped to connect
these RSEs with the wider Midlands community, benefitting both the individuals and the
regional community.

The RSE Midlands 2024 event started with a welcome session by the organising
committee and two talks about the SULIS Tier 2 supercomputer, hosted at Warwick and
accessible through the HPC Midlands+ partnership, and an overview of research
computing at Warwick. The two talks were led by Professor David Quigley and Dr Matt
Ismail respectively. Subsequent presentations explored three RSE perspectives at the
University of Warwick. Professor Nicholas Hine illustrated a user case study of SULIS,
while Dr Paul Brown delved into the role of RSE in Bioinformatics and Biological
Sciences. Dr Godwin Yeboah highlighted the application of RSE in Digital Humanities
(DH), culminating in a proposition for establishing a DH-RSE group across the Midlands
and potentially wider regions to advance DH research and scholarship.

Before lunch, we concluded the morning with a discussion on ‘RSEs as a part of the
research infrastructure and RSE identity”. After a quick-fire whole-room poll round,
where we asked all delegates whether they identify as an RSE or not, what their role is
and whether they are in a central team, academic department or something else, we
moved on to small-group discussions round each table. Questions posed included “As
an RSE, how do you connect with researchers and other RSEs?” and “As an RSE user,
how do you/would you like to access RSE services and collaborate with RSEs?”. We
also asked about examples of tensions between researchers and RSEs and projects
and reflections on how they were resolved and how they might have been avoided.
Finally, we asked “Do you consider yourself to be an RSE? In either case, what, for you,
have been the enablers and/or barriers to identifying as an RSE?”. We ended the
session with whole-room feedback on the key points from each table’s discussion. It
was an engaging session, giving delegates the opportunity to learn from each other’s
experiences.

After lunch, we had a series of lightning talks from contributors from across the
Midlands. Gavin Yearwood (Birmingham) talked about the RSE Midlands Coding Club,
reviewing the past talks and inviting others to contribute. Joe Heffer (Sheffield)
described a data pipeline he had worked on for managing data in a study of airborne
infection, evaluating what went well and what could be improved. James Brusey
(Coventry) shared some tips for making our work more reproducible, including using
GNU make for analysis pipelines and producing documents from analysis notebooks
with R markdown. James Tyrrell (Birmingham) shared his experience of helping to run
the centralised RSE service, involving line management, project management and
service management. Iqra Jilani (Coventry) reflected on her experience moving from
industry to academic research, finding software engineering in industry to be more
disciplined but also more restricted. The final lightning talk was from Iain Emsley
(Warwick) on using mobile applications to capture WiFi/Bluetooth signals on the streets
of Coventry.

Finally, we had a panel looking to the future with delegates from Intel (Fouzhan
Hosseini), Nvidia (Paul Graham) and an independent expert (Tom Deakin). The panel
discussed how heterogeneous compute will impact the architecture of future UK digital
research infrastructure. Having insight from two people from industry contrasted with
an expert in the field created a good discussion about what we as RSEs, and
researchers, need to consider when thinking about making use of new advances in
these architectures. We also got an insight into how though Nvidia’s CUDA and
solutions like Intel’s OneAPI they try to affect changes in the language standards that
will better support native use of new and novel compute platforms. This panel was a
good example of how the RSE community can engage with industry to ensure good
alignment between our needs and their development priorities.

The feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, praising both the content
of the conference and the networking opportunities it provided. The organising
committee – comprising Ella Kaye, Dr. Pip Grylls, Dr. Heather Turner, and Dr. Godwin
Yeboah – extends heartfelt thanks to all the sponsors, participants, and contributors
who played a role in the event’s success. We eagerly anticipate seeing everyone,
including new RSEs, at RSE Midlands 2025.

This event was sponsored by the Society’s Events and Initiatives fund, which provides financial support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives.