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!

There will be a seminar in the “research programming in practice” series by Dhavide Aruliah University of Ontario Institute of Technology (Oshawa, ON, Canada) on Weds 28th August at 2pm in Drayton B06.

Pseudo-arclength continuation is a well-established framework for generating a curve of numerical solutions of nonlinear equations. In my talk, I will review the basic ideas underlying adaptive predictor-corrector schemes for pseudo-arclength continuation emphasising where the bottle-neck arises in computation of rejected corrector steps. We have been developed a parallel code using standard C and MPI for adapting the step-length in pseudo-arclength continuation. Our method employs several predictor-corrector sequences run concurrently on distinct processors with differing step-lengths. Our parallel framework permits intermediate results of unconverged correction sequences to seed new predictor-corrector sequences with longer step-lengths; the goal is to amortise the cost of corrector steps to make further progress along the underlying numerical curve. I shall describe the essence of the parallel code and some of the issues that arose in its implementation. The goal is to have a straightforward interface to an MPI library into which researchers can plug in their serial C continuation codes to achieve modest improvements with widely available multicore desktop machines. This is joint work with Alexander Dubitski (Amadeus R & D, Toronto) and Lennaert van Veen (UOIT).

Another workshop which I will be at, which should be of interest to readers:

Research software engineers are the people behind research software.
They not only develop the software, they also understand the research
that it makes possible.

Software is a fundamental part of research, and research software
engineers are fundamental to good software. Despite this, the role is
not well understood in the research community. This is something the
Software Sustainability Institute is campaigning to change – starting
with a workshop for research software engineers.

We will bring research software engineers together to talk about new
tools and interesting work, to share ideas with people who do the same
work, and to discuss how we can overcome the problems that are faced by
all research software engineers – like gaining recognition and reward
for their work.

The term research software engineer is new, so many people who fulfil
the role will not describe themselves in this way. To help judge whether
you should attend the workshop, we’ve put together some questions:

1. Are you employed to develop software for researchers?
2. Are you a researcher who now spends more time developing software
than conducting research?
3. Are you employed as a postdoctoral researcher, even though you
predominantly work on software development?
4. Are you the “person who does computers” in your research group?
5. Are you not named on research papers despite playing a fundamental
part in developing the software used to create that research?
6. Do you lack the metrics needed to progress your career in research –
like papers and conference presentations – despite having made a
significant contribution with software?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you should attend the
workshop for research software engineers.

For more information:
http://www.software.ac.uk/workshop-research-software-engineers
Registration: http://workshopforresearchsoftwareengineers.eventbrite.co.uk/

The below workshop may be of interest to readers: I will be there.

First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science:
Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE)

http://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/
(in conjunction with SC13)
Sunday, November 17, 2013, Denver, CO

Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of
software at all levels and it is now critical to address many new challenges
related to the development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software. In
addition, it is essential that scientists, researchers, and students are able to
learn and adopt a new set of software-related skills and methodologies.
Established researchers are already acquiring some of these skills, and in
particular a specialized class of software developers is emerging in academic
environments who are an integral and embedded part of successful research teams.
This workshop will provide a forum for discussion of the challenges, including
both positions and experiences. The short papers and discussion will be archived
as a basis for continued discussion, and we intend the workshop to feed into the
collaborative writing of one or more journal publications.

The next installment of the Research Programming in Practice series will be by Mike Jackson. Mike is a software architect at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at Edinburgh University, and provides consultancy and training as part of The Software
Sustainability Institute. The event will take place on Tuesday 14th May at 3:30pm, in Roberts 309.

The Software Sustainability Institute is a UK facility which promotes better research through better software. We seek to shape UK research policy around software, engage with research communities, provide training in software development to researchers and to provide consultancy to specific research projects.

In this talk, I’ll give an introduction to The Software Sustainability Institute and an example of one of our successful collaborations – with MICE, the Muon Ion Cooling Experiment. MICE is a UK-based international collaboration of around 100 particle and accelerator physicists. The collaboration is based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and are working on a fundamental component of a proposed neutrino factory. MAUS (MICE Analysis User Software) is a modular, data-analysis package that provides a framework in which various MICE software functionality can communicate. MAUS is designed to support both online analysis of live data and detailed offline data analysis, simulation, and accelerator design.

I’ll describe how we worked with MICE to provide consultancy on how they could manage their software development, review their online resources from a sustainability perspective, and contribute to extending MAUS to support distributed job execution and analysis.

This will be an exciting opportunity to learn about the work of the SSI, who do great work to improve the quality and longevity of research software throughout the UK. (Disclosure: I’m an SSI Fellow.)

As part of the Research Programming in Practice seminar series, Matt Clarkson from the UCL Centre for Medical Image Computing will be speaking on “Unit testing C++ code for use in Medical Imaging.”

The seminar takes place on Tuesday 26th February, at 10am, in room 421 in the Roberts building in UCL.

Please forward the invite to groups you believe may be interested, and sign up for further notifications of seminars in this series via https://www.mailinglists.ucl.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/research-programming.