Society Updates

Welcome to the January newsletter from The Society of Research Software Engineering! Our bi-monthly (sometime monthly!) newsletter announces new Society initiatives, gathers RSE news, events, blogs, papers and anything else interesting and relevant together in one place. If you would like to add an item or suggest a new section to the next newsletter, submit it via this short form.

Membership

We currently have 687 paid-up members of the Society. Not yet a member? Why not join us today? Should you become member 700, you will win a prize (e.g. a conference tee-shirt)! Read about all the benefits of being a member on our website. We welcome people to become members who are not employed as RSEs but do support our mission. We are looking for a sentence, or one paragraph, contributions from such people to highlight the fact that we are about research software engineering and not just research software engineers. Several professors are active members of the Society, for example. Contact us at [email protected].

We are now on HMRC’s approved list, so you can claim Income Tax relief as an employment expense if you pay for your membership yourself. We come up under Society of Research Software Engineering.

Monthly Communications Forum of the Society

We will be starting a public and monthly communications forum on 29 February 2024 at 3pm. This is an opportunity to discuss ideas on how we should communicate with our members and the wider public and share news and events about what’s happening.  

The meetings will be held online (Zoom) and we will be sharing a link where you can register very shortly.

Mastodon

We are on Mastodon! Follow us @[email protected] . Happy Tooting!

Mentoring Scheme

After another great year, the RSE Society will be running a mentoring scheme for all career levels. Information sessions will be announced shortly but if you’d like to be kept up to date, please email [email protected] to be kept in the loop.

Conferences, Workshops etc, UK

RSE Conference 2024 in Newcastle, UK

Mark your calendar: the eighth annual Research Software Engineering Conference will take place 03-05 September 2024 in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

The world’s largest gathering of research software engineers (RSEs), RSECon24 brings members of the international community together to share their knowledge and experience, discover the latest tools and techniques, and connect with each other. The conference features a programme packed with a broad range of talks, posters and workshops, accompanied by lively social events in a historic city. RSECon24 has plenty to offer everyone from established RSEs to researchers and software engineers interested in exploring this growing discipline. And don’t worry if you cannot attend in person! Inspired by previous years at the conference, we are working hard to provide a complete and engaging experience for remote participants.

More details of the conference programme will be available soon, and https://rsecon24.society-rse.org/ provides more information about the venue, the event, and the people behind it.

RSE Community Weekly Seminars, Cambridge, UK

The RSE community at the University of Cambridge runs a weekly RSE seminar during term times hosting speakers on a variety of topics. Talks are on Thursdays at 1pm UK time, hybrid via zoom, and open to anyone who wishes to join. Further information and upcoming talks can be found at the associated link: https://rse.group.cam.ac.uk/seminars 

RSE Midlands Conference 2024, Warwick, UK

📢 RSE Midlands 2024: Calling all those interested in Research Software Engineering in the Midlands!

You are invited to participate in the third edition of the annual Research Software Engineering Midlands Conference (RSE Midlands 2024) which will be hosted by the University of Warwick at the beautiful Scarman Conference Centre. This event is proudly sponsored by the Centre for Research in Statistical Methodology (CRiSM) and the Society of Research Software Engineering.

This conference, lasting one day, is designed for those intrigued by Research Software Engineering (RSE) in the Midlands region. The event will feature a variety of short talks, both invited and contributed, complemented by discussion and panel sessions. This year’s conference is an opportunity to foster community building, meet new and old friends, and learn more about the incredible breadth of skills RSEs in the Midlands possess and envisage. 🤝

• Program & free registration: https://pretix.eu/rsemidlands/2024
• Date: March 7, 2024, 09:30 – 16:30
• Venue: Scarman Conference Centre (Scarman Space 41)

Follow us on

• – X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/RSE_Midlands 
• – Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@RSE_Midlands/ 
• – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/events/rsemidlands20247153675122900414466/
• – Github: https://github.com/RSE-Midlands 

Contact:

• Ella Kaye ([email protected])
• Heather Turner ([email protected])
• Pip Grylls ([email protected])
• Godwin Yeboah ([email protected])

Collaborations Workshop 2024 in Warwick 2024

#CollabW24 will be held from Tue 30 Apr to Thu 2 May 2024 at Scarman, Warwick Conferences on the @uniofwarwick campus and will focus on Environmental Sustainability, AI/ML tools for science, and Citizen science.

Registration is now open for a series of free to attend scientific computing courses for Environmental Scientists (UK based)

Following on from courses we ran last year, EPCC at the University of Edinburgh, along with the National Oceanography Centre and the University of Oxford, has had its NERC Training Grant extended!

  We will be running courses that cover skills and tools that train researchers and scientists in a range of core data skills for efficient, shareable, and reproducible research practices, via three sets of courses:

• An introductory course (for which no prior knowledge is required). This will cover simple use of the command line, an introduction to using python, and understanding version control.
• An intermediate course, covering data analysis and good programming practices, which will assume knowledge equivalent to attendance at the introductory course
• An advanced course, covering more specialist computational skills, such as how to run python in a distributed computing environment to help analyse large data sets

The introductory course will be run as four repeated courses:

• Wednesday 6th – Friday 8th December 2023 in Oxford (15th November) *
• Thursday 18th & Friday 19th January 2024 online, via Zoom (10th January)
• Wednesday 17th & Thursday 18th April 2024 in Edinburgh (27th March)
• Monday 17th & Tuesday 18th June 2024, in Liverpool (22nd May)

The intermediate course will be run as three repeated courses:

• Tuesday 20th – Thursday 22nd February 2024 in Edinburgh (31st January) *
• Wednesday 13th & Thursday 14th March 2024 in Oxford (14th February)
• Monday 13th & Tuesday 14th May 2024 online, via Zoom (1st May)

The advanced course will be run as two repeated courses:

• Tuesday 9th – Thursday 11th April 2024 in Liverpool (13th April) *
• Thursday 30th & Friday 31st May 2024 online, via Zoom (15th May)

Courses marked with an asterisk (*) are 3 days in length: the third day is a non-teaching day but is available for attendees to help consolidate the knowledge they’ve gained from the previous two days. Attendees are encouraged to do this by bringing along their own data or code. Following feedback from previous course, we hope this will be a valuable opportunity for attendees to become more confident with tackling coding problems; all of the teaching staff and helpers involved in the delivery of the course will be available to give help on these days. Although optional, we would strongly encourage all attendees of these courses to attend the third day.

Each day will run from 0930 to 1700, with refreshments and lunch being provided. Courses are open to any scientist working within the NERC domain in any academic, public, or third sector organisation, they will be free to attend, and with additional funding being available:

• UK travel and 1 night’s accommodation, for the in-person courses, with priority given to registered PhD students. For the 3-day courses, we can additionally fund a 2nd night’s accommodation.
• reasonable caring costs for attendees who have dependents, which means they would normally struggle to attend a course (either in-person or online).

All courses have a maximum capacity of 30 attendees.

Registration for all courses is now open at the following link: https://forms.office.com/e/XmwiCpMK38 – if you wish to apply for more than one instance of our courses, please complete the form for each course you wish to attend.

Please do forward to others who may be interested in these courses. Questions about the courses can be sent to Chris Wood: [email protected]

Conferences and Workshops worldwide

FOSDEM 2024 HPC Track, Brussels, Belgium

The call for participation for the HPC, Big Data, and Data Science devroom at FOSDEM’24 (probably the biggest open source software event in Europe between 3-4 Feb 2024 in Brussels, Belgium) is now open:    https://hpc-bigdata-fosdem24.github.io

deRSE24 Conference in Würzburg, Germany

The 4th conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany, will be hosted at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg between 5 – 7 March 2024. The call for contributions is now closed. Hurry, registrations close on 1 Feb 2024. The programme and other details can be found at https://events.hifis.net/event/994/overview. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact the organising team if you have any questions. Contact details are to be found using the link above.

Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC24)

(https://pasc24.pasc-conference.org/), to be held in Zurich in June 2024. The theme of PASC24 is “Synthesizing Applications Through Learning and Computing”. The PASC Conference series is an international and interdisciplinary platform for the exchange of knowledge in scientific computing and computational science with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high-performance computing.  Contributions from various and diverse venues of scientific computing and its applications are very welcome! 

The deadline for submissions has expired in the meantime. If you have any questions, contact the organisers on [email protected]g

Podcasts

After a short break over the Christmas and New Year’s period, Code for Thought is back with Season 7. 

• Net Zero & Computing? Part 1 with Wim Vanderbauwhede (Uni. Glasgow) and John Wernvik (Eco Datacenter, Sweden)
• Patterns in Science and Medicine with Veronika Cheplygina from the IT University in Copenhagen
• ByteSized RSE: Easy Does It – with easybuild – Jörg Saßmannshausen (Imperial College)
• German Episode: Eine Arbeitswelt für Alle (A work environment for all) – Bernadette Fritzsch and Ruth Schöbel

Plus, there are episode to catch up with from December (and the months & years before). Find the podcast on all major podcast directories and on YouTube (audio only) Code 4 Thought – YouTube or on the hosting site https://codeforthought.buzzsprout.com/.

RSE Worldwide

Awareness of the RSE role and the RSE community is growing around the world with new national groups being created all the time. In this section, we introduce these groups and raise awareness of their success. The Society supports new groups and collaborates with representatives from them on various initiatives (papers, international workshops).

In January 2021, the International Council of RSE Associations was founded as a forum to communicate and formally meet to ensure cohesion between associations and to provide a platform for open discussion around international issues and affairs.

(In alphabetical order)

RSSE Africa

AU/NZ RSE Group

Belgium Research Software Engineers Community

Join the (informal) chats of the Belgium Research Software Engineers community on https://gitter.im/be-rse/. 

Digital Research Alliance of Canada / Alliance de recherche numerique du Canada

Responsibility for Research Software in Canada is transitioning from CANARIE to The Alliance.

de-RSE

Dates for the joined monthly calls of the Open Science und Research Software Engineering communities can be found here.

NL RSE

New meet-ups are scheduled for NL RSE. Interested in proposing a workshop, talk, or some other contribution? Get in touch!

Nordic RSE

The Nordic RSE Group https://nordic-rse.org/ held their online Unconference on 25 – 26 October 2023 https://nordic-rse.org/events/2023-online-unconference/ . It is the third event organised by Nordic RSE. As before, the event was a good mix of workshops and presentations. If interested, follow the link to see more details.

Research Software Hour…Hosted by members of the Nordic-RSE community, this continues weekly on Twitch. Research Software Hour is an online stream/show about scientific computing and research software. It is designed to provide the skills typically picked up via informal networks; each week, they do some combination of exploring new tools, analyzing and improving someone’s research code, and discussion. Watchers can take part and contribute code to us which they analyze and discuss on stream. They broadcast on Twitch Thursdays at 20:30 Oslo time / 21:30 Helsinki time.

US RSE

Upcoming and recurring events can be found on the events website!

The next US RSE conference in October 2024 will be in Albuquerque, New Mexico, US. The