January 2023 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter January 2023

Welcome to this month’s newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News, Web & Blogs

Web and Publications

• From the RSE Team blog Who’s to Blame? - Neil writes about using this unfortunately titled feature of git to better understand the history of code in a project.
• A new book with Sheffield-based co-authors “Live Coding: A User’s Manual” Performative, improvised, on the fly: live coding is about how people interact with the world and each other via code. In the last few decades, live coding has emerged as a dynamic creative practice, gaining attention across cultural and technical fields—from music and the visual arts to computer science.
• Announcing the 2023 Software Sustainability Institute Fellows - Read this blog post from the Software Sustainability Institute to find out more about the fellowships they have awarded.
• A comprehensive Online Rust Course has been made available by the Android team.
• A really valuable perspective on convincing academics to use git (video) from Juulia Suvilehto at NormConf. More useful and interesting videos from NormConf 2022 are available see the main track and lightning talks.
• Invest 5% of research funds in ensuring data are reusable It is irresponsible to support research but not data stewardship, says Barend Mons.
• MathWorks have added a new MATLAB training course to the catalogue of courses available to everyone at University of Sheffield. If you already know the basics of MATLAB programming, the Object-Oriented Programming OnRamp Object-Oriented Programming Onramp - Self-Paced Online Courses - MATLAB & Simulink (mathworks.com) should take you around 2 hours to complete and will lead to a certificate that you can add to online profiles such as LinkedIn.
• UKRI is looking for 3 people to join their infrastructure advisory committee - Closing date 12 February 2023

Events

• Open Research Conversations The University Library is holding a series of Open Research Conversations throughout the spring semester. These are lunchtime online seminars featuring talks from 2-3 speakers followed by discussion. Lots of interesting stuff here!
• Love Data Week 2023: Exploring Dryad (webinar) - 17th Feb 2023 - … explore how University of Sheffield researchers can get the most out of our membership of Dryad.
• Introduction to Synthetic Data for Researchers - 21st Feb 2023 - N8CIR event: This interactive workshop has two parts, the first of which introduces the basic concepts of synthetic data, shows examples, and explores why researchers need to be aware of what synthetic data is.
• The Call for Proposals for DjangoCon Europe 2023 Is Now Open! - closes 26th Febuary 2023
• Python GPU Programming Workshop - 18th Feb and 28th April 2023 - N8CIR event: Want to learn more about how to write code in Python that can take advantage of graphical processing units (GPUs)? Sign up for this two-part course introducing GPU programming through Python.
• ShinyConf 2023 - 15-17th March, 2023, all-virtual.
• Intermediate Software Development Skills for Earth and Environmental Scientists: Reproducible Research through Reusable, Reliable Code in Python - 27th-31st March 2023, University of Manchester. Fancy improving your research techniques within the Earth, atmospheric and oceanic sciences? For any questions about the course and application, please contact Anja Le Blanc via e-mail at anja.leblanc@manchester.ac.uk.
• Symposium: Perspectives on teaching reproducibility - 20th June 2023, Sheffield, UK - Reproducibility has gained a lot of attention in research and many disciplines have adopted policies recognizing the value of open scholarship. The teaching of reproducible methods has received somewhat less attention, but is no less important. Some excellent examples are documented in the November 2022 issue of Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, where a number of instructors reflect on “Teaching reproducibility and responsible workflow” and how to embed reproducible workflows, data management and transparent reporting in courses and programmes.
• Centre for Open Science 2023 Unconference on Open Scholarship Practices in Education Research - 9th to 10th March 2023 - The 2023 Unconference will be a virtual participation event featuring participant-led sessions analyzing the current state of open scholarship practice seeking solutions to identified problems. Participants will assess barriers to adoption of open scholarship practices unique to the education community and brainstorm strategies for promoting greater awareness.

Training

Research IT Training

Research IT is providing a place for beginners or advanced users to expand their knowledge of HPC and different programming languages. The courses are part of the Doctoral Development Programme. For more information please visit our training registration web page (via VPN): crs.shef.ac.uk.

RSE Team: Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop - from Zero to Hero!

This is an introductory course, teaching the git and GitHub skills required to manage research code over it’s development lifecycle. These skills are essential for collaborative research teams.

• Git & GitHub through GitKraken workshop 2023-03-06 & 2023-03-07

If a course is “sold out” please join the wait list by signing up - we regularly email people to encourage those that can no longer attend to cancel. Those on the wait list get early notification when the courses are run again.

Opportunities

Funding

• Artificial intelligence hubs for real data and for scientific and engineering research - Deadline 9th February 2023. Apply for funding for a research hub in either artificial intelligence (AI) for real data or AI for scientific and engineering research.
• Artificial intelligence innovation to accelerate health research - Closing date: 28th March 2023 - Apply for funding to develop innovative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to be applied to health challenges.
• Mathematical and computational foundations of artificial intelligence - Deadline 2023-02-09. Apply for funding to advance the fundamental mathematical, statistical, and computational concepts that underpin artificial intelligence (AI).
• Get up to 12 days of software engineering support for your HPC/ML/GPU project. Deadline N/A. The Research Software Engineering team is offering to support researchers with the use of High Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) and Graphics Processors (GPUs) in their research projects. All researchers at our University can receive up to £5,000 of support time, or roughly 12 days of support, provided by a Research Software Engineer (RSE). This call aims to increase the uptake of the University’s Tier 2 HPC resources, which are national facilities available to researchers in all faculties. This is an open call and applications are considered on a first-come-first-served basis. There is no current deadline and applications will be reviewed on an ongoing basis.

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are a monthly series of short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

LunchBytes needs YOU!

LunchBytes are organised by and for the research software community at The University of Sheffield. If you’d like to curate a session on a topic or present something, get in touch by emailing lunchbytes-organisers-group@sheffield.ac.uk - Or suggest topics on the jamboard.

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to hear from you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software.

They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The Sheffield RSE Team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.

Research IT

Research IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff. Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.