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.

As part of the “Research Programming in Practice” seminar series, Brian Hole , founder of Ubiquity Press and creator of the Journal of Open Research Software will be speaking about a thorny problem for computationally-focused researchers: how do you best build a publication record and enhance your academic reputation when your primary output as a researcher is software?

The Journal of Open Research Software is one potential solution, associating a software entity with a peer-reviewed journal publication. (Disclosure: I’m on the Editorial Board of JORS)

This will be an exciting event, and I’m sure there will be plenty of discussion about this difficult issue for computational researchers.

The seminar takes place on Tuesday 12th February, at 10am, in the B15 Lecture Theatre in the Darwin Building.

We are pleased to announce a Practice of Research Programming Event Series.

Across all research fields, the day-to-day work of many researchers now involves significant amounts of programming.

This series will provide a forum for these practitioners of computational science to share the techniques that underpin their work. Discussions will focus on generalizable methodologies, not scientific results.

Most sessions will take the form of traditional research seminars, where speakers present techniques they have used in their research. Speakers will give examples of using best practice or novel techniques to achieve better scientific outcomes from software construction and maintainance. We will also occasionally host hands-on “coding dojo” style events, hack days, and TED-style lightning talk sessions.

The first such event, open to all UCL staff and students, will be on Tuesday November 13th at 11am, in the B05 LT in the Chadwick building, where Dr Ben Waugh will speak about “Developing software to see the Higgs Boson”.

Feel free to display the poster below in your research group.