Introduction

The RSE Society is able to provide financial support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives (see our constitution section).

The objectives of the RSE Society are:

• To advance education particularly but not exclusively amongst research software engineers; and/or 
• To promote and advance research particularly but not exclusively in all aspects of research that rely on software engineering and to publish the useful results.

See our strategy for 2020/2021 for further details about our planned activities to support these objectives.

One of the first education events that we sponsored took place in Nigeria and what follows is a blog post from Dr Timothy Ogunleye about their training event.

There is no way we can discuss the term data science today without mentioning the R software. This software serves as a major tool in handling data science problems. These days, unlike few decades ago, datasets are enormous and cumbersome to handle manually except machines and software are used. Therefore, a 3-day training workshop, proudly sponsored by the Society of Research Software Engineering, entitled ”Data Science with R” was conducted between 10th – 12th August, 2021 at the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye, Ogun State, Nigeria. The event was graced by the Head of Department of Mathematical Sciences of OOU, training team members and an impressive participants’ turn-out. Out of the over two hundred applications received, only 80 were randomly selected to cut across many disciplines such as statistics, computer science, mathematics, economics, and so on. Two of us facilitated at the training. The selected participants were grouped into two with a view to observing COVID-19 protocols in Nigeria.

You will recall that the training’s objectives are to assist and encourage young statisticians as well as those making use of statistical techniques in their daily activities with a view to achieving their set goals. While this is done, it is also expected that at the end of the training, the participants should be able to:

• Use more robust techniques in reporting statistical information via data visualization and infographics.
• Acquire more knowledge in computing econometric model’s parameters and ANOVA with R syntax.
• Identify and employ appropriate methodologies to extract meaningful information for decision making.
• Generate and tabulate data (simulation), and perform statistical operations with a view to determining an appropriate technique in handling some basic problems relating to computing & statistics.

However, all these line-by-line objectives are achieved as both pre-and-post questionnaire tests were conducted on the two trainers: Timothy A. OGUNLEYE and Dr Monday O. ADENOMON, who were the only two available trainers as at the time it was conducted. Both theory and system-based practical using learning approach with R language were used. This training was targeted not only at students but also researchers, lecturers, statisticians, actuarial scientists, data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, administrative officers, monitoring and evaluation officers, policy makers, development partners, economists, econometricians, etc. It all started at 10:00GMT and ended at 16:00GMT each dat. By approximation, 46 and 34 male and female respondents attended the training with full sponsorship from the Society of Research Software Engineering (SRSE) indicating that 57.5% and 42.5% represent male and female gender respectively. Special topics like descriptive and applied statistics, simple linear and econometrics models, data graphics and visualization, and finally machine learning, data mining, and business intelligence were all covered during this 3-day training.