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.