Open Discussions

Research Software Directories: What, Why and How?

Mark Woodbridge, Vanessa Sochat, Jurriaan Spaaks

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...

Why do we need an EuSSI?

Stephan Druskat, Bezaye Tesfaye, Carlos Martinez-Ortiz

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

Matthew Bluteau

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...

Research On The Go

Peter Schmidt, Mark Turner, Adrian Harwood

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

Sarah Leinicke, Mahmood Shad

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...

Code Review Community

Hollydawn Murray, Rachael Ainsworth, Dannon Baker, Olly Butters, Jeffrey C. Carver, Luis Pedro Coelho, Fergus Cooper, Barry Demchak, Kenan Direk, Stephen J Eglen, Daniel S. Katz, Helena Ledmyr, Thibault Lestang, David Nicholson, David Miguel Susano Pinto, Esther Plomp, Fotis Psomopoulos, Amy Strange, Leonid Tiokhin

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

Jamie Quinn

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...

Embedding a Jupyter Notebook

Teri Forey

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...

Little Minions in Archaeology - an open space for RSE software and small scripts in digital archaeology

Florian Thiery, Ronald Visser, Moritz Mennenga

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

Indranil Ghosh

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

Configuring Sphinx from scratch: making your own documentation and making your documentation your own

Sadie Bartholomew

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

Dr. Emmy Tsang

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

Dr. Gregor Mönke, Frieda Sorgenfrei, Dr. Christoph Schmal, Dr. Adrian Granada

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)

Kenneth Hoste

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

Hazi Hannah, Meredydd Luff

Learn how to speak Python for the web!

Particle image velocimetry to study cell migration

Stefania Marcotti, Dr. Burki Mubarik, Prof. Brian M Stramer

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?

Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Faruk Diblen

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!

Jonathan Dursi

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

Stephen Anning, Dr. George Konstantinidis, Dr. Craig Webber

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

Carsten Thiel

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

Daniel Garijo, Yolanda Gil, Maximiliano Osorio, Varun Ratnakar, Deborah Khider

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

Dr. Jack Brookes, Matthew Warburton, Prof. Mark Mon-Williams, Dr. Faisal Mushtaq

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.

Dr. Teri Forey

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

Dr. Rizwan Malik

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...

How to understand and improve the performance of your parallel applications using the POP Methodology

Fouzhan Hosseini

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

Dr. Ana Trisovic, Dr. Merce Crosas

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...

I wanna dance with somebody

Kari Jordan

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'

Mariann Hardey

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

James Smithies, Arianna Ciula

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

Dave Horsfall

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 ...

Learnings from developing and maintaining a research software that has been used more than 3 million times in the last 3 years

Dr. Abhishek Dutta

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...

The Continual Road to an Inclusive Definition and Use of Terms for the US Research Software Engineer Community

Sandra Gesing, Dr. Daniel S. Katz, Dr. Lance Parsons, Dr. Charles Ferenbaugh, Dr. Ian Cosden

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

Dr. Tobias Weinzierl

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

Sophie Schmidt, Florian Thiery, Timo Homburg, Martina Trognitz

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

Matt Machin

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.)

Matt Parker

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

Dr. Sylvain Laizet

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

Dr. Teresa Gomez-Diaz, Prof. Tomas Recio

The goal of the proposed talk is to present the publication

Wikidata as a research tool for data modelling and integration in the humanities - Examples from the German Wikimedia Fellow Program Free Knowledge

Florian Thiery, Sophie Charlotte Schmidt, Jakob Voß

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

Philipp S. Sommer, Viktoria Wichert, Daniel Eggert, Tilman Dinter, Klaus Getzlaff, Andreas Lehmann, Christian Werner, Brenner Silva, Lennart Schmidt, Angela Schäfer

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

FAIR 4 Research Software

Dr. Anna-Lena Lamprecht, Dr. Daniel S. Katz, Dr. Fotis Psomopoulos, Dr. Jennifer Harrow, Dr. Leyla Garcia, Mateusz Kuzak, Dr. Michelle Barker, Morane Gruenpeter, Dr. Paula Andrea Martinez, Neil Chue Hong
Repeated events

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?

Dr. Anna-Lena Lamprecht, Dr. Michelle Barker, Dr. Carlos Martinez
Repeated events

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

Anna Brown, Alan Simpson, Andy Turner, James Grant, Josephine Beech-Brandt

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

Jeremy Cohen, Dr. Michelle Barker, Daniel Nüst

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

The SORSE Finale


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...

Lightning talk session


We will run a lightning talk session on Wed 20th January 2021 at 3pm UTC.