Welcome to the November 2024 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.
This training curriculum offers a modular programme to support researchers in applying FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and open research practices to their research software. The programme is aimed at researchers, including PhDs and postgraduate research students at the University of Sheffield, who create code (whether a few scripts or something more substantial) as part of their research and who want to make their research more open by applying the FAIR principles to their software or simply want to become more confident in the research code they are writing.
The programme will be running over the next few months. For more information check out for the RSE page where you will find links to register for modules that are already scheduled. You can also find the modules on myDevelopment (requires institutional login).
In the first session which took place in October, our Head of Research Software Engineering, Romain Thomas, delivered a talk titled “Better software for Better research: Introduction to the FAIR2 for Research Software training programme”. In this introductory talk he presented what the FAIR principles are and why they are crucial to make your research more open. We gave some initial hints on how to apply them to software and present the FAIR training programme that our teams have designed for the UoS research community.
The recording of the talk and the slides are both available.
FAIR2 4RS Workshops
These events form part of the FAIR2 4RS training programme discussed in this newsletter’s introduction.
The FAIR2 for Research Software Training Programme has been developed by the RSE, Data Analytics Service and Library teams and launched in October. The full syllabus is now live on MyDevelopment (requires login).
Sheffield Bioinformatics Core
The Sheffield Bioinformatics Core is pleased to announce a schedule of courses for the new academic year. These courses provide an introduction to the R programming language, Unix environment (required for the use of the University’s High Performance Computing facilities) and also specific applications in RNA-sequencing. You can now sign-up for these courses using myDevelopment (search for “bioinformatics”). Course charges still apply, and upon sign-up we will contact you for a valid grant code or cost centre. In-person attendance is encouraged, but online options are also available.
Where multiple dates are listed, you will need to attend all dates. You can also find more information on these course on their website (https://sbc.shef.ac.uk)
Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board.
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 6th November 2024.
LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.
Due to capacity within the RSE team, there was very limited LunchBytes content over the past academic year. This should be changing soon, a new coordinator for LunchBytes has been found (Research IT’s Farhad Allian), with a plan to reboot these lunchtime seminars in the spring semester.
More information will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the RSE mailing list if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with Farhad if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk
Information and access to JADE II and Bede.
Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.
Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.