This year’s RSE conference took place from 3^rd – 5^th September in Newcastle. Around 20 ARC staff attended in person, with several others joining in the hybrid experience remotely. The latter has been steadily improving year on year, at least for contributing to the formal parts of the conference programme. The informal conversations are still much better in person, and this aspect was particularly appreciated by our newer RSEs. This blog post summarises our joint impressions of the conference, based on a debriefing discussion we had in our weekly “Collaboration Hour” later in September, and edited by Jonathan Cooper. We have raced against the conference committee to get this blog post out before the conference materials are published!

The programme had a mix of technical topics and sessions devoted to how we work as RSEs, and indeed wider “Research Technology Professionals” (RTPs) as well. RTP is a newly coined phrase used by UKRI among others to refer to the wide range of specialist roles that exist alongside traditional researchers, encompassing all the ARC professions and more. Several initiatives are aiming to leverage the success of the RSE movement to advance other professions in a similar way, some of which we are involved in or proposed at the conference, notably in the RSE leaders and aspiring leaders satellite event on the Monday. This has grown massively since its inception as a safe space for those struggling to create RSE groups to share the pain and learn from each other! Now there are many kinds of RSE group, many individuals in different RTP leadership roles, and much more wide-ranging discussions as a result. I particularly appreciated the session on the skills that leaders need in this environment – what people have found helpful and how we should be growing the next generation.

A similar topic was covered in the RSE Competencies workshop, although this covered all areas of RSE skills and tried to categorise these. We ended up with more non-technical skills than those focused on specific technologies. The work is ongoing with monthly community meetings, aiming to build a toolkit that will help people advance their careers: identify skills they need and avenues for training and professional development.

Several sessions focused on project management and Agile approaches. We heard from Manchester how they are adapting Scrum for their research projects, notably the categorisation of projects that they have according to how large they are and how engaged the researchers are, and therefore the different sort of tweaks they’re made to Scrum in each case. These seem to be fairly similar to how we operate in ARC, but in a more formalised structure. We contributed to the discussion session they ran on the following day (led by Sarah Jaffa, formerly of ARC!) with Monika and I doing a double act presenting a high level view of our approach and a summary of Kanban. An important theme of that session was that project management is as much about self-care as it is delivering on the goals of the project, and these aspects need to be well balanced or both suffer. A special interest group (SIG) is being set up dedicated to project management, and we have continued discussions within ARC too, with a recent blog post on adapting the agile values and principles to a research context.

Others in the group focused more on the technical programme. Mutation testing was one highlight – described as sort of like test coverage, but your code is randomly changed to see what breaks. If no tests fail then you may have revealed an untested code path that needs to be tested and fixed. It’s good for catching edge cases that haven’t been thought of but does take time to run. We noted that this is good as part of a wider array of testing approaches that can be used, for example hypothesis testing (randomising code inputs rather than the code itself).

Best practices for setting up development environments were covered in a couple of talks, and how this is perhaps one aspect that distinguishes an RSE from a CS researcher. These range from use of pip and pipenv in Python to things like dev containers and Nix. These are important for reproducibility. The Netherlands eScience Centre python project template had a nice feature that allows updating projects created using a template when updates to the template itself are made.

Several talks looked at performant Python. We were surprised (perhaps unfairly) at how much impact simply upgrading to the latest Python version can have. Tools like numba and approaches such as vectorisation were well known, but tips for using list comprehensions, sometimes in preference even to Pandas apply operations, were appreciated and will be useful for several of our projects.

As you might expect from ARC we had significant involvement in the high-performance computing sessions, including Tuomas running a “birds of a feather” (BOF) event for the HPC RSE community and giving several talks. Talks not by us covered a range of topics, including the age-old comparison of the merits of different languages and porting between them, the newer frameworks aiming to ease GPU programming, portability between different hardware, and debugging parallel programs. We enjoyed trying out the Grace Hopper chips in IsambardAI, and discussing how to utilise HPC in the most environmentally sustainable way. The conclusion from Archer2 is that given the CO₂ released by manufacturing HPC systems, the best option is to run them as intensively as possible since this maximises the research done for a given carbon cost – and indeed that personal lifestyle changes may be a better option for minimising your impact!

Green RSE was the focus for another BOF which some ARC staff attended. A SIG is being set up for this, trying to raise awareness of what RSEs can do and consider what training might be helpful. This is something we want to get involved with more at ARC, starting with an inventory of our current state in conjunction with the department’s Green Team.

The Fortran satellite event was very well run. It revealed that many people want similar improvements to the Fortran ecosystem to support automated testing and the like. We have recently started an initiative along those lines at ARC so will be trying to work with the wider community on this and avoid duplication of effort, having now met some relevant people.

Some talks focused more on particular research domains. Given ARC’s current efforts developing Trusted Research Environments (TREs) we were interested by the Turing’s approach. They worry less about packages coming into the secure environment, and advocated for just proxying CRAN, PyPI and the like, while making sure that your infrastructure is set up securely enough that things can’t get out unless you want them to. So if something does get in and cause havoc, it shouldn’t be able to egress any data and it should only affect a single study or project. This is also the approach we take in ARC’s TRE.

The unconference session was a highlight for some, particularly discussion of developing software as a medical device. This covered trying to work with people in the institution to come up with processes, but also trying to figure out what the role of RSEs and the Society of RSE should be in that process. Are we just followers or the ones coming up with the process? How much of the regulatory side is our responsibility and who else we need to work with? No firm answers from that, but lots of questions! A prototype tool we developed for one project may be useful here if we can get funding and/or collaborators to continue the work.

All found the keynote talks inspiring, especially the one from Anne-Marie Imafidon. The test driven development workshop got a mention as being really clearly presented with great materials, as did an interesting C++ graphics library called Morphologica.

We are all looking forward to next year’s conference in Warwick. On a personal level, I’m especially pleased that it is likely not to conflict with INSET days and I’ll be able to be there in person again.

I, together with Malvika Sharan and Arielle Bennett from the Alan Turing Institute / The Turing Way and Neil Chue Hong from Software Sustainable Institute, attended at the beginning of July OSPOs for Good symposium at the United Nations Headquarters, representing research institutions from the UK.

What’s an OSPO?

An Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) is an entity within an organisation that looks after their Open Source strategy and operation. OSPOs have been set in the industry for many years (and under many different names), but it’s only till recent years when academic and research institutions as well as government and world organisations have also started to create them. Certainly, the goals of all these different OSPOs differ, but by having a common name helps to develop a fabric across them to promote collaboration.

OSPOs for good?

At the symposium, OSPOs from different entities – national and local level government, institutions and private sector – together with open source communities, think tanks, and activists, joined together to discuss how Open Source and through those varied programme offices can be used to help tackle the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ideas ranged from those that can run within specific communities, companies, or institutions to collaborations across all of them. 

For over two years now, the UN has been running an OSPO, and this event is part of their commitment to working with the whole world. The symposium gave details about how OSPOs were formed and their motivations, as well as advertise initiatives from those attending. For example, the OSPO at the UN started by a survey to all its sub-organisations to know their positions on Open Source Software, whether that’s from a user, creator, maintainer, community member or stakeholder point of view. They have grown fast and highlighted that Open Source is more than Open Source Software! Open Source covers open communities, knowledge, data, science, …. On the digital front, these were referred to as Digital Public Goods (DPGs), which I think conveys more weight than open source software or open data. A person may not understand what open source software is, but a public good resonates that it has something good for them!

On open source communities, however, many of us have the tendency to focus on the software and forget to look beyond it. How can we go an extra step and check how what we are creating can be relevant to the SDGs? That may look too hard (and even ambitious?), if that’s the case, we should have a commitment to no harm – I firstly heard it from Malvika’s talk: Applying Do No Harm principle to enhance open source sustainability at SOOCon24. That’s where many of us need to start with, reviewing our practices and applying do-no-harm principles within our communities to work towards Open Source for good.

Though many people see the goods of Open Source for the world, not everyone at is an open source advocate! Even within the UN, they’ve got challenges and myths against Open Source that are common in many other communities. Some of these are based on trusting more big tech companies or using privacy or security concerns as an excuse to prevent opening their source (whether it’s data, code or knowledge). Regarding security, however, a recent event that caused a worldwide mayhem demonstrates that vulnerabilities are not exclusively on open source software.

From understanding how UN’s OSPO works within a multi-organisation level, we moved into a state/local government level. In Germany, they are working to unite much of the different wheel-reinventions at different states into a more collaborative approach where the tools and processes are shared (such as platforms like openCode). This has not only stopped there, but they are collaborating with France too! There, the BlueHats initiative helps to promote and recognise the community behind Open Source development within government. Funding open source is a big problem, and that was discussed too – people from Sovereign TechFund and ZenDiS gave an overview of the current successful model that’s being used in Germany.

Initiatives within foundations and cities were also discussed, as well as the opportunities universities can have collaborating with their local communities on that.

One of the UN’s OSPO star activities mentioned and praised was Reboot the Earth. Five hackathons that happened around the globe to come up with ideas that can advance the SDGs. The winners from each of them presented their ideas to us, and now they are taking part in a coaching programme to scale their solutions. This was very inspiring!

Once the symposium finished, I, together with many of the attendees, participated in a 1-day workshop: What’s next for Open Source? There we had more time to interact and collaborate between us and come up with various lists of actions to keep pushing forward the idea of Open Source for good. At least, one thing was easily done: we made connections between various organisations that will convert into future collaborations.

What’s next for UCL?

Well, glad you asked! At ARC we are starting to build an OSPO to provide Open Source guidance and support to research, education, and e-infrastructure projects through the whole university. At the moment we are scoping our vision and midterm goals, but hopefully soon we can advertise our plans to the rest of the university and the whole world. Would you like to be involved? Write to us at open.source@ucl.ac.uk.

Where can I read more about the event?

You can check the event highlights, the event recordings and reports from other attendees such as Nicole Martinelli at OpenSource.net, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at The New Stack and at The Register, Nithya Ruff at the Linux Foundation, and Henriette Litta at the Open Knowledge Foundation,

Over the last 15 months there has been much debate, hype and concern relating to capabilities of tools and platforms leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and media generators. Broadly termed Generative AI. The predominant narrative in Higher Education has been around the perceived threat to academic integirty and associated value to degrees. As such a lot of focus and discussion has focused on taught students, assessment design and “AI-proof” assessment. This has been coupled with concerns relating to the inability to reliably detect generated content, and the disproportionate number of false positives related to non-native English speakers text submitted to various platforms.

However, despite the proliferation of Generative AI enabled research tools and platforms, numerous workshops offering increased research output productivity and publications asking authors to declare whether or not these tools were used in producing outputs there has been limited discussion with relation to staff and research integrity.

Coupled with the publication of initial findings from a study on staff use of these tools by Watermayer, Lanclos and Phipps that included use to complete “little things like health and safety stuff, or ethics, or summarizing reports” and potential safety risks from fine-tuning models as reported in the Stanford Univeristy published policy briefing Safety Risks from Customizing Foundation Models via Fine-Tuning a workshop focusing on the interplay of Generative AI and research integrity and ethics was proposed as an AIUK Fringe event.

Research Integrity in an AI-Enabled World took place on Monday 25th March 2024. The aim was to explore how we think Generative AI enabled tools and platforms, could and should impact on the research process, and what the integrity and ethics implication are. Eventually aim would be to produce a policy white paper.

The event was organised so that there was a series of thought provoking talks in the morning, followed by a world-cafe style session in the afternoon. The event was held under the Chatham House Rule to enable open and frank discussion of the topic and arising issues.

The first set of talks predominantly focused on ethical issues. There were discussions on authorship, and the nature of authorship where multiple actors are involved e.g. training data creators, platform developers and prompters.  Bias in image generation, reinforcing misconceptions and stereotypes. Culminating in a talk on the University of Salfords evolving approach to Generative AI and research ethics.

The second set of talks was focused on current capabilities, limitations and implications of using Generative AI enabled tools in the research pipeline, predomintly focusing on qualitative analysis. This session included a discussion around evidence synthesis and the need to find more efficient methods whilst maintaining reliability and a breadth of knowledge, and different approaches using “traditional” machine learning approaches versus use of large language models. Enhanced capabilities of Computer Aided Qualitative Data Analysis Systems and implications for methodological approaches were also introduced and discussed. The session concluded with a talk from Prof Jeremy Watson about the work currently being undertaken by the UK Committee on Research Integrity’s AI working group, of which he is member. Key themes currently under consideration by UKCORI are:

• Governance
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Skills and Training
• Public Understanding and Expectations
• Attribution and Ownership – IP, etc.
• Understanding Data Inputs and Models
• Need for Research in AI and Integrity

During the world-cafe session participants addressed the following questions:

• What do we mean by Research Integrity in an AI-Enabled Research Environment?
• Are there degrees of Research Integrity based on discipline and how embedded AI use is in the research process?
• What are the key ethical and legal considerations?

Including the following participant proposed questions:

• Generative AI is extremely good at in-filling uncertainty, where details of images become filled with bias. Should the responsibility of bias be equally on a prompter who enables this by omission?
• Recalibration of government and private funded RI in AI? Isn’t this the foundation of biases for RI?

Outputs from the world cafe session will be analysed over the next few weeks, and workshop participants were invited to contribute to the development of workshop outputs.

Key themes that emerged from the event include:

• Transparency
• Criticality
• Responsibility
• Fitness for purpose
• Data protection and privacy
• Digital divide – privilege and harms
• Training – education

The workshop was well received by participants, with the participants rate their overall experience of the event as 4.71 out of 5.

The speaker sessions were rated as very good by over 70% of participants. With the world cafe being mentioned as a highlight of the event.

 

 

 

As the proposer, organising and the host of the event I can’t help but still wonder:

• Can we ethically and with genuine integrity use tools which are fundamentally ethically flawed?
• Why are we accepting of these issues?
• How should we be pushing back?

I will leave you with these words from Arudhati Roy with which I opened the event:

Last Friday (the 10th of November) we run our first ever Julia workshop. After years of having an expert in our team – Mosè – who has been introducing the rest of the team to this wonderful language and even convinced some collaborators to use it on their projects, we’ve done the jump to teach it to the UCL community.

This first workshop was limited to a reduced number of learners (10-12). Seven of which attended (most of them physicists!), with our team of three (myself instructing, with Mosè and Tuomas helping — also all physicists 😅) made the learners’ experience very positive.

Originally, we were going to use the Carpentries Julia lesson available in the incubator. However, Mosè and I decided against it as the expected previous knowledge was higher than what we were aiming for. Therefore, we created our own lesson!

Our lesson started with the basics, different types of numbers, strings and how all them fit in the family of types in Julia. We introduced some of the quirks Julia surprises you with when you come from a different language. This was key in our lesson! We started to write a function as if it was Python — which was what we expected to be the most familiar for our cohort. From there, we were introducing new concepts and syntax to make our code more “julianic” (I’ve come up with that term, so it may not be the one used by the Julia community). We covered the basics (types, function, conditionals, loops and plotting) during the morning session. After lunch, we went to introduce how to use other libraries to solve polynomials and ordinary differential equations. We even introduced unit testing and had time to learn how to work with CSV files with DataFrames and gave a quick overview of Pluto.

During the preparation of the material and the class, I was constantly supported by Mosè, bouncing lots of ideas and suggestions. We’ve even found a bug in one of the libraries we were going to use that they fixed instantly after Mosè reported it.

The class went smoothly. We encountered some problems with the installation of Julia and some unexpected slowness when installing libraries (we reported it after the workshop, and it was also fixed straight away!). This is some of the feedback we’ve received at the end of the day:

• Great course, learned a lot.
• The course has been great. The pace is good and it allows us to ask any questions we have.
• Comparison’s to Python really helped me appreciate the advantages of Julia. Paper plane example was great.
• Very good course, covered all the right topics for a 1-day intro session.

Personally, I don’t remember a class that has gone so well! With very little difficulties, covering everything we were planning to do and answering very interesting questions from our learners. It may have been due to the small number of learners, or because of their previous programming experience, or the similar background across all of them, or maybe, it’s because Julia is easy to learn 😉. Whatever reason it is, I really want to repeat it, with a larger class and a more varied background of learners. There’s no reason for only letting the physicists have fun with Julia, right.

So, if you are interested in learning Julia, be sure that we will repeat more sessions like this one! This may be too basic for you? Don’t worry, we are also planning to run a more advanced workshop focused on Julia for HPC during Term 2’s reading week. Keep an eye out for our future announcements.

Now that we have started, we won’t stop!

RSECon23 opened with a keynote from Gael Varoquaux, introducing themes synergistic to my conference workshop “How do we design and deliver sustainable digital research education”.

The actual theme of the workshop, what role(s) does RSE have to play in Education for Sustainable Development probably wasn’t what most participants were expecting. However, there were some very good conversations and ideas for action.

The workshop opened with two questions:
1. What does Sustainable mean to you?
2. What does Education for Sustainable Development mean to you?

These set the scene for the discussion in the session.

Key definitions and the SDGs

Sustainability
“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

UN, 1987

Sustainable Development
“An aspirational ongoing process of addressing social, environmental and economic concerns to create a better world.”

Advance HE / QAA 2021

Education for Sustainable Development
“The process of creating curriculum structures and subject-relevant content to support sustainable development.”

Advance HE / QAA 2021

The workshop participants were introduced to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals and asked to consider which are areas for development in RSE and which of these areas can we affect through education?

There was a general consensus that almost all are related in some way to RSE activity and impact that activity. The most notable being SDG 4: Quality Education.

Through RSE led education activity it was felt that the SDGs that could be affected were:

• Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing
• Goal 4: Quality Education
• Goal 5: Gender Equality
• Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
• Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities
• Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Goal 12:Responsible Consumption and Production
• Goal 13: Climate Action

For Goals 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and 17 (Partnerships For The Goals) it was unclear as to how these would apply.

Barriers and Opportunities

The discussion then focused on barriers to having an impact on the SDGs but also what opporunities we had for making a positive difference.

Barriers

Key themes from the discussion on barriers were:

• Resources: time, people, data sets
• Funding
• Lack of training, confidence in education skills
• Lack of recognition
• Lack of support / mentorship

Opportunities

Key themes from the discussion on opportunities were:

• Ability to design our own materials and select data sets
• Work collaboratively, as a community
• Ability to raise awareness of issues
• Access to experts from across our institutions
• Access to education related CPD (if in a university setting)
• Our learners want to learn
• Our educators are passionate about their work

Although there are some well recognised barriers, there is also a lot of opportunities and connections we can leverage to make change.

The Call to Action

The workshop concluded with a design task to identify concrete steps we could take to address the barriers and leverage the opportunities.

The calls to action were:

• Never teach alone
  • Enables different ways to explain
  • Could lead to a variety of role models
  • Less pressure
  • More perspectives
  • Broader variety of disciplines
  • Different background knowledge
• Encourage those who found it difficult to return as helpers and instructors
• Humanise the educators
  • Introductions
  • Live coding
  • Coding confessiona
• Co-development of lesson materials
  • Share ideas and examples
  • Examples from different domains
• Talk to learners
  • What is needed?

Most importantly, we are community and should leverage that community to learn from and support each other.

So, let’s work together to make a positive change!

You can view the original results on Mentimeter.

View the Twitter / X thread from the workshop.

Two weeks ago (20th – 23rd June) we ran an internal workshop in our group to reflect about our teaching activities. As any good workshop, it also included a fun hack day at the end to work on pet projects or ideas that we haven’t had the time to work on it before. This is a summary of these four days and a reflection for the future.

The workshop was set with two main purposes: review all the teaching activities we are involved, and learn some techniques to become better teachers. The workshop was attended by roughly 8 people every session, this contributed to allow everyone to participate. The event was fully hybrid, with roughly a 50-50% participation of people joining physically and remotely (the trains and tube strike shifted the participation towards a 30-70% towards the end of the week).  Thanks to the big screen and the semi-separated areas we have in our collaboration space, together with how the workshop was run with smaller physical and virtual small groups, contributed to a nice flow of the workshop.

Each day of the workshop was broken into two 2-hour blocks, one in the morning from 10:00 to 12:00 and one in the afternoon form 14:00 to 16:00. This helped to disconnect a bit, catch up with other commitments or have time to enjoy lunch in the park while recharging our solar batteries.

In terms of tooling, we used MS Teams as the conferencing tool (our calendars and the big screen are linked to it) – we also explored the breakout rooms feature it provides; HackMD and Etherpad for note-taking; Google’s Jamboard for collaboratively moving cards in a digital medium; IdeaBoardz to collect feedback; and tried (with only partial success) Visual Studio Code’s Live Share to pair-program during the hack day.

Now that the logistics and tooling has been explained, let’s dive into the content of the workshop.

The workshop started with a short review of the Carpentries instructor training lessons. That workshop lasts two full days, and this session lasted only two hours. Therefore, many things were not covered (like practising the teaching), however, we covered some basics about how learning works and how to create a positive learning environment. As any Carpentries workshop, they are full of activities and discussions, and we had good and interesting discussions. The afternoon of that day, we spend it discussing a set of uncomfortable scenarios that may happen during a teaching activity. These scenarios were created by Yanina Bellini Saibene for Metadocencia and translated by J.C Szamosi. They are a very useful resource to explore before they manifest in a real situation. The scenarios were distributed between the different small groups and then shared with the bigger group our suggested actions. Of course, sharing it in the bigger group was also a source of new point of views and ideas. We highly recommend doing this exercise to everyone who takes part in any teaching activity! The day finished with a review of the Science of Learning paper. As with the previous exercise, we distributed the sections across us and discuss it first in small groups and then as a whole. This is a nice quote about the paper from Sarah in our team:

I want to print this out and stick it all over my office so I can see it whenever I teach.

The second day was focused on our teaching activities and an overview of Submitty, the autograding tool we use in a couple of master courses we teach. We started with a set of lightning talks (aiming for 1 minute each, but all of us overran a bit) for each teaching activity we are involved in. Each talk has to describe the teaching activity with its topics, the audience to whom it is aimed to, the format, what is going well and what can be improved, and finish it with the challenges presented for next year – all that in one minute! We had 13 talks, some of these talks are from courses or workshops we run once a year, others are about courses that happen multiple times. Two of them were from the UKRI Data Science Training in Health and Bioscience (DaSH) projects we are involved with: IDEAS and Learn to Discover. The last one was a short summary of the teaching activities from our friends at Digital Education. The afternoon was focused on Submitty. First with an overview of how the system looks from the different point of views (student and instructor) and then how to set up the exercises. We completed the day with an exercise about thinking how to plan the autograding of two questions from past assignments. The main conclusion of this exercise was that for autograding to work, we need to be more specific on what we ask the students. This, however, may have its disadvantages as it limits the freedom of how the students may approach a problem.

The third day was an ABC Learning Design workshop led by Nataša Perović from UCL’s Office of the Vice Provost Education & Student experience. The workshop starts with an overview of the different learning activities types as described in Diana Laurillard’s work “Teaching as a design science”. We spent the practical side of the workshop, focusing on three of our courses. It was a very useful exercise that we should do more frequently to keep improving and fine-tuning our courses. In the afternoon, we learnt how to migrate our notes from Jamboard into the Learning designer tool from UCL’s Knowledge Lab at IOE. One cool feature that Nataša demonstrated to us is how our Learning Design structure can be exported into Moodle.

The last day was the hack day. We have a collection of mini-projects that we would like to work on, but that normally get postponed till we have the time… Well, finally the time arrived! We tackled four of these projects, two were completed quite quickly, and the other two got started (and that’s sometimes the harder bit!) and hopefully the inertia keeps them moving to a complete state soon. One project that involved an analysis of students grades included a good discussion at the start about the ethics and privacy of the project. This helped to make some decisions of which dataset we were going to use (e.g., the anonymous dataset provided by Moodle before the marks get released), and future ideas about how to clarify to the students how the assignments get graded anonymously.

That was how we’ve spent four days last week learning how to improve our teaching, reflecting on what we’ve done so far and planning what we can do to have better courses in the future. After the positive feedback and seeing how useful a focus week without other distractions can be, we may make this a recurrent annual activity!

The Tech Socials are back after our summer break, this time with a twist. For September’s social, we decided to follow up on a SeptembRSE event with our own discussion.

The topic was how to get started with technologies like high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The panel members came from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Research Computing (ARC), research institutes in molecular biology and sociology, as well as industry. We wanted a range of perspectives, and we think we got it!

There’s lots to talk about on this topic and the discussion proved that, as we moved away from practical tips (such as keeping in mind the scale of your data and workloads) to consider the broader context. We covered policy issues, like the availability of seed funding, ideas for tackling the “skills gap” that researchers and students have to overcome, the importance of wrapping your head around what is possible to do with new technologies, all the way to the right attitude, and how technologists can more efficiently communicate with researchers in the social sciences and humanities (hint: some humility is advised).

If this sounds interesting, do watch the recording (unfortunately missing the first few minutes of introductions!). We are still exploring how ARC can best serve UCL, so get in touch if you think we can work together – you can find out more about what we do on the Research Programming Hub pages until the website reflects our change to ARC.

Thank you to all panel and audience members for their contributions!

In the weeks running up to the RSE Conference, myself and some colleagues will be providing our thoughts on the questions people have submitted for our panel discussion with senior university management about how RSEs are being supported within academia. (You can submit more questions and vote on the current questions on Sli.do.)

Question: If you have a central university RSE group do other staff working in RSE-like roles in academic departments have the same career opportunities as that group?

As research software groups grow, seemingly inevitably they start to acquire more structure and hierarchy, with more senior roles being created to help manage the group. This provides for career advancement opportunities within the group, although often this is with the caveat that an increase in grade requires more managerial responsibility and reduced time for technical work. The situation is more bleak for those employed directly in research groups, typically on a fixed-term postdoc style contract where typical academic advancement routes – dependent on a publication record – do not easily apply. How can universities ensure the same opportunities are available to all staff?

Several groups have tried to address this challenge by making their job descriptions and selection criteria available to the whole university, for instance at Sheffield and King’s Digital Lab. This promotes consistency of approach, and gives the potential to aim at senior roles with appropriate selection criteria. Sustaining posts beyond a single funding source still presents a bottleneck to supporting careers, however. Central RSE groups with a large project portfolio and successful track record can often offer permanent contracts to staff, whereas this is rarely an option for individual research groups. At UCL we are investigating the potential of establishing ‘satellite’ groups within academic departments. These would be able to offer equivalent terms and conditions to their staff, and collaborate closely with the central team. We are not there yet however!

It is also worth considering a broader perspective. For staff trapped in a succession of fixed term contracts, ‘career opportunities’ is often synonymous with getting a permanent post, ideally at senior postdoc or even up to professorial pay grade. There are however many directions of travel that could be considered. How do we allow university staff, wherever they may be based, to move flexibly between teaching, research and professional services roles (or a combination thereof!), into industry and back into academia, always learning new skills along the way? How can progression be linked to expertise in different technical areas, not just management responsibility?

This question is ultimately not limited to RSE roles, but affects the wider network of roles within academia. UCL’s career pathways initiative (aimed at professional services) and academic career framework provide hopeful first steps in supporting more flexible careers, but there is still plenty of work to be done!

Hear an expert perspective on this and a variety of other questions from a panel of senior institutional representatives covering roles in research, HR and research software at the Science and Engineering South panel on “Institutional Support for RSEs” at RSEConUK19 on the 18th September at 13:30. You can also read previous blog posts in this series by Simon Hettrick and Jeremy Cohen.

Back in early September was the third edition of a series of conferences dedicated to Research Software Engineering.

It’s like the national meetings that exist for numerous disciplines, but to talk about us: our community and career paths, ways to serve the research community better, tools and techniques for better software, among others. As expected, almost the whole Research Software Development Group (and Ian Kirker from Research Computing!) attended the conference.

This year’s conference was really important for us: the conference started with a keynote by our very own Prof. Eleanor Robson of UCL Archeology, who talked about Oracc, the longest project our group has been involved in since its creation, including a couple of demos of the tools we have created for writing translations of cuneiform texts. We had Ilektra Christidi in the organizing committee, who also co-organized and co-chaired the international session, a lively event where RSE’s from around the world exchanged views and experiences from the communities of their countries, and discussed about cross-country initiatives and collaborations. Tom Dowrick – our affiliated team member – gave a talk about using the Robot Operating System to create a reproducible platform for surgical device development.

As usual, there were interesting workshops and talks from researchers, RSEs and representatives of big industry players alike. We especially enjoyed the workshops about singularity; JupyterHub + kubernetes; lean tools for product development; and parallelizing python applications. Talk highlights covered building computer vision systems by Microsoft Research; why making scientific software sustainable is difficult; GUI’s and visualization; lessons from CASTEP on rebuilding legacy software; and an entertaining and enlightening presentation from Catherine Jones (STFC) on how to shut down services gracefully – something we’ll be putting into practice as we deprecate our local Jenkins service in favour of the national service STFC are now piloting.

There was also exciting news for the future of RSE in the UK, with the announcement of a new registered society due to be launched soon. And we are excited to have struck up an agreement with the Software Sustainability Institute to collaborate with them on analysing their international survey results – more news on that in the coming months!

Our group head Jonathan Cooper attended several sessions looking at different aspects of managing RSE groups, as well as having many stimulating discussions with other RSE group leaders. There was a helpful workshop on inclusivity and diversity in RSE recruitment, discussing everything from wording of adverts to structure of interviews – and indeed how we maintain a welcoming culture within our team. UCL is doing well in so far as we have 6 nationalities within the team, 40% of our senior team female, and have put together majority-female interview panels, but there is no room for complacency. We’ll be looking at what outreach we can do to demonstrate what a great career path RSE is for all people. A panel session with RSE group leaders highlighted that all RSE groups across the UK face much higher demand for their services than they can match with current staffing levels, and so training the next generation of RSEs will be crucial.

A funders’ perspective from Susan Morrell (EPSRC) and David Carr (Wellcome Trust) underlined again the increasingly heavy dependence of UK research on software development, and hence the need for RSEs. Wellcome’s emphasis on open research was particularly encouraging. Also of interest here was an ARCHER study showing a 3:1 return on investment for their eCSE programme, which provides RSE support to researchers using national HPC resources. In another session we thought about ways in which RSE groups can benefit the wider community: not just delivering projects which benefit the researchers involved directly, and ensuring these tools are usable by others, but contributing to underpinning open source projects on which many researchers depend.

All in all, enough technical and social activity – a good warm up as term begins and we resume our regular activities, like drop-ins, Tech Socials, and coffee mornings!