Month: December 2019

A review of the RSE team’s activities in 2019

2019 has been another very busy and productive year for the RSE team in the Research Computing Service at Imperial College. Our core mission is to accelerate the research conducted at Imperial through collaborative software development, and we have now completed 24 projects since our inception 2 years ago with 75% of our first-year projects resulting in follow-on engagements. We’ve highlighted 5 of our most fruitful collaborations on our new webpages, which also provide more information about the team and the services we offer. We are about to appoint our fifth team member, reflecting the value we’ve offered to research projects (and proving that there is a career pathway for RSEs!).

In addition to our project work we’ve assisted researchers at over 40 RCS clinics this year and played a strong supporting role in Imperial’s Research Software community, from Hacktoberfest to departmental events. We’ve developed two brand new Graduate School courses in Research Software Engineering (to be delivered next term) and have helped deliver 4 Software Carpentry workshops. We’ve also played an increasingly active role in promoting the benefits of RSE (and the role itself) to relevant stakeholders in the College. This has complemented our broader engagement activities: acting as expert reviewers for JOSS submissions, contributing to numerous OSS projects, presenting at 3 international RSE conferences (deRSE19, UKRSE19 and NL-RSE19), and promoting our work via blogging, social media and attendance at several other relevant events – locally (e.g. RSLondonSouthEast 2019) and nationally (e.g. CW19, CIUK).

RSE19 conference photograph
The team (amongst amongst many other RSEs!) at UKRSE19. Photo courtesy @RSEConUK.

We continue to develop tools and infrastructure to support RSE within in the College. The nascent Research Software Directory aims to showcase the breadth of software developed at Imperial, encouraging collaboration, re-use and citation. We’re also attempting to give software a stronger position amongst research outputs through our current work on the Research References Tracking Tool (R2T2) and helping researchers submit their software to Spiral via Symplectic. Finally, we continue to share advice and guidance on how to adopt better RSE practices, such as QA and CI.

As we look forward and further develop the Research Computing Service’s RSE capacity and expertise we’d like to thank all the academics who have trusted us with their projects, and all the researchers who’ve taken the time to explain their work and have enthusiastically embraced good software engineering practices. We’re looking forward to another 12 months of strengthening RSE at Imperial!

1st Research Software Winter Seminars and Roundtable

On Thursday 12th of December the Research Computing Service joined the College’s Research Software Community in celebrating the 1st Research Software Winter Seminars and Roundtable, the final event of another great year of building research software at Imperial. The event had two goals: first, to celebrate the research software-related achievements of the RS Community during 2019, and second, to plan the activities and goals for the year that is about to start.

The seminar session featured nine exciting talks, ranging from a review of the activities of the Community during 2019 and the training opportunities in computing and data science skills, to technical talks on the use of complex analysis pipelines for RNA sequencing and the extension of open source software with custom features.

This is the full list of talks, including several relevant links:

After the talks, there was a roundtable discussion chaired by Diego Alonso, with a panel including Elsa Angelini, Jeremy Cohen, Phoebe Pearce and Mark Woodbridge, to help answer some questions about what the audience would like to see from the Community next year, how we can communicate with each other better and who can get involved to make those things happen. There were many excellent contributions from the audience, who were also very engaged and eager to see the community grow and take an active role on it.

Among the activities that were discussed – and that gained volunteers to help make them a reality – were the creation of a Slack workspace as an instantaneous, bidirectional communication channel within the community (already up and running; sign-up now!) and the recruitment of RSE Champions in the different communities (PhD students, postdocs, etc) to promote Community events and bring more people aboard or to assist with the organisation of departmental events.

The event concluded with informal drinks and nibbles in the ICT Kitchen – including mulled wine! – where the enthusiastic attendees and speakers mingled together and shared experiences and plans for the future.

There are plenty of things going on and 2020 is due to see a very bright RS Community at Imperial!