Programme
- Open Discussions 2
- Panel Discussions 2
- Posters and Lightning talks 6
- Software demos 7
- Talks 23
- Workshops 4
Open Discussions
Research Software Directories: What, Why and How?
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This discussion session will focus on Research Software Directories: catalogues to showcase the software outputs of an institution or community. We will introduce the topic before demonstrating three independently-developed open source directories, explaining their respective benefits and ease of...
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Software sustainability is an important aspect of research software engineering. Good practices in software sustainability are still evolving and are not yet universally standardized. Different practices have emerged within domain specific communities, and expertise is additionally shared in loca...
Panel Discussions
Research Software and the Modelling of COVID-19 in the UK
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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 created an urgent need for epidemiological and infectious disease modelling. In the UK, a surge of local and national initiatives quickly emerged to support existing research groups with the increased demands of this crisis, and Research Software E...
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Software for research comes in many different forms and technologies. This includes software that runs on mobile devices. The demand for this is growing, whether it is for “citizen-science” projects or in clinical and educational research. In this SORSE (online) roundtable event, we discuss ex...
Posters and Lightning talks
Development of an Automated High-Throughput Animal Training Platform
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In traditional neuroscience laboratory research, training animals to execute sensorimotor tasks is time consuming, labor and resource intensive, and prone to human bias and error. The Research Software Engineering team at Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Science Research Computing (FASRC...
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Code review for research software is the process by which peers evaluate each other’s source code. This involves checking that the code does what it claims and is written in a way that can easily be read, maintained, and built upon. Code review is an important tool for ensuring that software is h...
Four pillars of a reproducible PhD
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Reproducibility and sustainability of research and associated software are increasingly viewed as priorities by publishers, funders and the academic community. The process of writing a thesis can be a playground where modern PhD students can explore new tools and techniques for improving the repr...
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Many RSEs and researchers are familiar with using Jupyter Notebooks to analyse data and output results, but how can this functionality be included within a larger platform or application? Creating a new analysis tool would take a lot of developer hours, and so a more cost-effective solution could...
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In our daily work, small self-made scripts, home-grown small applications and small hardware devices significantly help us to get work done. These little helpers - “little minions” - often reduce our workload or optimise our workflows, although they are not often presented to the outside world an...
QGameTheory: An R package for teaching quantum computing and quantum game theory to students
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This is a package that has been written in the R programming language. As we know, R is an open-source software that is being widely used by statisticians and scientists all over the world. The purpose of this package is to build a very simple open-source project that will teach the basics of qua...
Software demos
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In this demonstration we will build a mature documentation system from scratch for a dummy project using the Sphinx documentation generator, the infrastructure of choice for the documentation of a huge number of modern software projects, including of Python itself.
Executable Research Article (ERA): Enrich a research paper with code and data
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Code and data are important research output and integral to a full understanding of research findings and experimental approaches in a paper. However, traditional research articles seldom have these embedded in the manuscript’s narrative, but instead, leave them as “supplementary materials”, if t...
Optimal time frequency analysis for biological data - pyBOAT
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Methods for the quantification of rhythmic biological signals have been essential for the discovery of function and design of biological oscillators. Advances in live measurements have allowed recordings of unprecedented resolution revealing a new world of complex heterogeneous oscillations with ...
European Environment for Scientific Software Installations (EESSI)
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What if there was a way to avoid having to install a broad range of scientific software from scratch on every workstation, HPC cluster, or cloud instance you use or maintain, without compromising on performance?
Web apps with the power of Python
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Learn how to speak Python for the web!
Particle image velocimetry to study cell migration
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Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is a widely used optical method originally developed to understand fluid dynamics by tracking seeded particles moving through a fluid. In the context of biological disciplines, image-based pseudo-PIV is now a common tool to examine flows in tissues and cells, by e...
How FAIR is your research software?
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FAIR software is a topic of growing importance in the research software landscape. There have been efforts to describe the how the FAIR principles apply to research software and work in this direction is still ongoing.
Talks
Help! I'm a Research Software Manager!
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Research software development teams are too important to be managed poorly. But no one teaches us to be good managers — especially in academia.
Towards an NLP Pipeline for Conflict Narrative Detection
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This talk is about PhD research into developing an NLP pipeline for Conflict Narrative Detection. In response to increased incidences of online abuse, a new industry of hate speech detection using NLP has emerged. Accordingly, we tested NLP technologies used by this industry to discover how quant...
From experimental software to research infrastructure maturity
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The challenges facing research software development are manifold and have long been a major topic at RSE conferences.
Towards Knowledge Graphs of Research Software metadata
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Research software is a key asset for understanding, reusing and reproducing results in computational sciences. An increasing amount of software is stored in code repositories, which usually contain human readable instructions indicating how to use it and set it up. However, developers and researc...
UXF - Framework for creating Virtual Reality human behavior experiments in Unity
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Recent advances in technology has meant that Virtual Reality (VR) is now a feasible tool for performing human behaviour experiments. Scientists dream of being able to have full control over human sensory inputs, as well as complete measurement of responses. VR is coming closer to fulfilling this ...
Becoming a self-employed RSE web developer.
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This is a two part talk, initially focussing on how I changed career and established a sole trader business, the second part on the latest web development techniques I use.
Bringing Imaging-Based Artificial Intelligence into Clinical Practice in NHS Radiology
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Whilst there are over 200 Imaging/Radiology AI Companies world wide there are currently only about 50 FDA approved algorithms. There are also significant barriers to overcome in bringing AI to the NHS landscape. In Bolton NHS Foundation Trust we are the first NHS Organisation to deploy the Qure.A...
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HPC applications are often very complex and their behavior depends on a wide range of factors from algorithms, to programming models, library and language implementations and hardware. The task of understanding performance bottlenecks of a parallel code and making improvements often ends up being...
Improving FAIRness with containers
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The FAIR guiding principles state that published research objects should be made Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for other researchers. Data repositories provide research dissemination following FAIR principles while also developing standards and tools to facilitate them. Howeve...
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The Carpentries vision is to be the leading inclusive community teaching data and coding skills. Our first lesson program, Software Carpentry, was founded on several core values, including feedback, gratitude, and collaboration. The role research and data plays in your personal and professional l...
Switching off the label 'women in tech'
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The focus of the talk is on the ways in which women are discursively constructed in the context of professional spaces in tech clusters. This is to give time to consider how the label “women in tech” (WiT) is dominated by the masculine perspective of tech work and characterised by how individuals...
Digital Humanities RSE: King's Digital Lab as experiment and lifecycle
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This SORSE event describes King’s Digital Lab (KDL), a Research Software Engineering lab operating within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London (UK). The KDL team of 18 project managers, analysts, designers, engineers, and systems managers specialise in arts & humanities...
Goodbot, Badbot? Engineering trust into conversational interfaces
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As more people interact with bots driven by Artificial Intelligence, it is important to understand how to create relationships based on trust. The FinTrust Project at Newcastle University is looking at the role of machine learning in banking, particularly in the context of automated chatbots and ...
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Manually annotated images and videos are a fundamental part of many research projects and industrial applications. However, manual image annotation tools are often designed to address one specific use case and lack the flexibility to be reused across different projects. Furthermore, these tools o...
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An important part of building a strong and resilient community is fostering collaboration between individuals with varying backgrounds, expertise, and viewpoints and building a diverse and inclusive community. While the term Research Software Engineering was initially suggested in 2010, there are...
My project expired and my team left, so let's rewrite all the software from scratch
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Peano is a framework for large-scale simulations using dynamically adaptive Cartesian grids. It is used today for Earthquake and Black Hole simulations, for example. The fourth generation of the software is currently under development.
Research Squirrel Engineers - An independent squirrel network for RSEs in DH and archaeology
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People who write code for research are few and far between in the archaeological sciences. Quite often they are regarded as technicians and their function in research projects reduced to those of “helpers”, diminishing their contribution to the success of the undertaking. Nowadays some students o...
Applying Scrum to Research Software Projects
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Background Scrum is a modern, agile and widely used software development methodology. Rather than trying to set requirements in stone at the beginning of a project, Scrum embraces the idea that requirements will change during all software projects. It takes an iterative, incremental approach and ...
When Spreadsheets Attack! (and other maths disasters.)
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In October 2020 the UK government lost thousands of COVID test results because they hit the limit of the maximum number of rows in an Excel file. This is but one of many, many mistakes made all around the world because of spreadsheet abuse. In 2012 the State Office of Education in Utah miscalcula...
RSE careers in France: the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) option
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In this talk, I will introduce the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). The CNRS is an interdisciplinary public research organisation under the administrative supervision of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Its main role is to advance knowledge for the benef...
On the evaluation of research software: the CDUR procedure
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The goal of the proposed talk is to present the publication
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Research Software Engineers and their work is becoming increasingly important in digital humanities research just as digital humanities gain traction. Not just developing and extending software are important for this process, data creation, data publication and data management are equally critica...
A new distributed data analysis framework for better scientific collaborations
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A common challenge for projects with multiple involved research institutes is a well-defined and productive collaboration. All parties measure and analyze different aspects, depend on each other, share common methods, and exchange the latest results, findings, and data. Today this exchange is oft...
Workshops
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The software has become essential for research. To improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of research software, it is desirable to develop and apply a set of FAIR Guiding Principles for software. Application of the FAIR principles to software will continue to advance...
What do we (not) know about RSE?
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Research Software Engineering (RSE) is increasingly being established as a field and profession in its own right. Since the term was coined about a decade ago, RSE has also been the subject of empirical research to gain knowledge and evidence about the various aspects involved. For example, the 2...
Partner Event - HPC Champions Workshop
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The next HPC Champions workshop will be held virtually over 2 afternoons on the 17th/18th September, and will involve talks, discussion sessions and working group sessions. Topics covered will include updates from the national and regional supercomputing sites, training, and plans for knowledge a...
Building Research Software Communities: How to increase engagement in your community
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Communities are a very important aspect of the development and sustainability of research software engineering. It was as the result of a community meeting back in 2012 that the Research Software Engineering (RSE) movement came about. This goes to show the potential power of a group of individual...
Other events
During a challenging year in which all of us are likely to have spent some or all of our time working from home, we have also missed out on the opportunity to attend traditional in-person events and conferences. The various national RSE workshops and conferences that have been run over recent yea...
We will run a lightning talk session on Wed 20th January 2021 at 3pm UTC.