July 2024 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter July 2024

Welcome to the July 2024 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

We are hiring!

We’re recruiting a Research Software Engineer on a permanent contract! Please help forward to anyone who may be interested! Closes: 4th August 2024.

News

Thank you to everyone who applied for the 2024 RSE collaboration call for proposals. This call is now closed. We had 25 applications! We will now review the applications and make decisions on the successful projects by the end of the month.

Events

Upcoming events in Sheffield

• Changing Research Culture
  • 2024/07/09 @ 10am-3pm. In anticipation of REF2029’s heightened emphasis on People, Culture and Environment, ‘research culture’ is increasingly coming into scope as a focus of attention for UK institutions. But critical and reflective work is needed to avoid the term becoming, like ‘excellence’ itself, a floating signifier that obscures the genuine conditions, processes and limitations of academic practice. This one-day workshop will address this task with a particular focus on practices around openness and transparency. In person, with online attendance available for keynote talks only.
• Register for OpenFest 2024
  • 2024/09/10 - 2024/09/12. Co-delivered by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, OpenFest is our flagship celebration and exploration of open research, providing an opportunity to explore current issues, share experiences, and consider how open research can be applied in your discipline.

Upcoming external events

• A conversation about Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) in the RSE community: reflections on successes and challenges.
  • 2024/07/31 @ 3pm-4pm. In our next event in the DiveRSE series, Ella Kaye (Research Software Engineer, University of Warwick) and Malvika Sharan (Senior Researcher – Open Research at the Alan Turing Institute and co-lead of The Turing Way) will converse about their experiences in/with the RSE community, as well as both the challenges and successes they’ve encountered when working to improve EDIA.
• DRI Retreat 2025
  • 2025/01/13 - 2025/01/17: This five-day residential retreat will again take place in Manchester and comprises panel discussions and group sessions for technology specialists to develop soft skills and network with peers. This national event is open to software engineers, infrastructure engineers, data managers, academics, and industry professionals at any stage of their careers. We encourage those new to these fields to attend. Paid accommodation is offered to all in-person attendees.

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Articles & Blogs

• Funding Open Source Science Software

• Open Access: A Benefit Not a Burden That is Worth the Cost

• Researchers from the FORCOLAB at the University of Toronto (UofT) are conducting a research study on understanding the #refactoring practices and challenges in open-source #scientific #software..

• Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone

• Enhancing FAIR compliance: A controlled vocabulary for mapping Social Sciences survey variables

• Better Scientific Software (BSSw)

• Survey on Refactoring Practices in the Development of Scientific Software

Papers

• The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative

• Acknowledging Good Java Code with Code Perfumes

Podcasts

• Code for Thought: Research Software Engineering Workshop at ISC 2024 in Hamburg.

Training

For more forthcoming RSE training events, keep an eye on our Training page and join our mailing list to hear about new events.

Jobs

• We’re recruiting a Research Software Engineer on a permanent contract! Please help forward to anyone who may be interested! Closes: 4th August 2024.

• New RSE Service Lead post in BEAR.

• Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board

Community

Digital Research Practice Support Community

The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field.

You can join the google group here to stay informed.

The next meeting is scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 17th July 2024.

Support

RSE support via the Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI-RSE)

Sheffield’s Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI) is funding 1 FTE of research engineering time, enabling RSE to provide AI/ML services without cost recovery. The CMI-RSE team primarily supports members of the University community by enabling, designing, implementing and refining AI streams in research projects.

If you have a project in mind that would benefit from CMI-RSE involvement, please have a look at the FAQ and complete the application form to register your interest and begin the conversation. Note: Due to the amount of projects received, this call is on hold until November 2024.

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help 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.

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.