CW12 Breakout topics

Break outs are discussions between a group of people who share an interest. They are a fundamental part of the Collaborations Workshop, which help people learn about new ideas and work on solving shared problems.

More information on how the break outs work can be found on the breakouts page.

Make this list count!

It is your job to make the break outs relevant to you. How? By info [at] software [dot] ac [dot] uk (suggesting topics) for discussion. A break out topic can be anything that's related to research or software.

All of the topics that have been suggested so far are listed below. Closer to the workshop, all delegates will get to vote on which of the topics will make the agenda.

Topics

The titles of the breakout topics are listed here. For more information on each topic, scroll down.

Focussing on research

• What "Grand Challenges" can be addressed by collaboration with software developers?
• Challenges of big data in life sciences
• Collaboration and reuse of artefacts
• Outreach to specific research fields
• Intelligent analysis of medical data
• Cultural heritage, multimedia and the semantic web
• Measuring and monitoring carbon emissions from everyday actions in life (with specificity in mind rather than just the generic) so that the impact of pro-environmental behaviour change can be better measured.
• The role of the internet in engaging pro-environmental behaviour
• How to collaborate with computer scientists and end up with something that is documented and robust rather than a proof of principle
• Programming courses for researchers in science
• Making use of high-performance computing infrastructures
• Challenges in high-throughput data analysis
• The role of Virtual Laboratories for Molecular Biodiversity
• How can researchers and software developers work together to identify and develop smart, sustainable software solutions?
• Reconstruction algorithms in x-ray phase contrast contrast tomography
• Dealing with large datasets in contrast tomography
• Modelling eutectic solidification
• Effect of microstructure on melting/freezing temperature

Funding and strategy

• Developing the profession of a scientific software engineer
• How can developing software help your REF2014
• How do the different research councils fund software, and what plans do they put in place for ensuring it has a future?
• Which research council provides the best resources for describing impact?
• Advice on the best approaches to obtaining research funding

Software and open-source projects

• How to operate an open-source software project effectively
• Prolonging the life of open-source software after initial public funding ceased
• Software testing (an often neglected step in software development)
• Software attribution, citation and credit mechanisms
• Practical experiences of collaborative development: what works and what doesn't
• How do you get information on user numbers, and user feedback on software (walking the tightrope between getting feedback and cyber stalking...)
• Stop writing code for yourself and start writing code for everybody!
• Software tools assessment for academia
• What makes research-oriented tools development unique (if anything), and how does this affect software engineering practices which should be applied?
• Automated testing of Web Applications
• Workflow development
• Introduction to continuous integration
• Software development as part of data management plans
• Best practices for documenting scientific software development
• Tools for deployment and sharing of scientific code

Building a community and dissemination

• Building networks across disciplines
• How to blog, and how to run a blog
• Bringing together the work of the Institute's Agents and Super Pals, and the SeIUCCR Community Champions
• Open research: can we move towards open publication for software
• Incentives for software publication
• Managing copyright and licence issues
• Using social networking to increase your impact
• Using the internet and social media to better publicise research to the public and within the scientific community
• The best journals for publishing software results in each research discipline

Focussing on research

• What "Grand Challenges" can be addressed by collaboration with software developers?
  Everyone knows that software can aid research, but getting that help to the right people is not always straightforward. Which research could benefit from working with software developers?
   
• Challenges of big data in life sciences
  This breakout will be lead by Jan Taubert from Rothamsted Research. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies enable fast and cheap DNA sequencing. New algorithmic approaches are required to address the associated challenges as the growth of data generated and its associated computational costs have already out-grown Moores’s and Kryder’s laws.
   
• Collaboration and reuse of artefacts
  Distributed collaboration produces user-generated content as an outcome: wikipedia pages, open source code, twits, blog entries and so on are all generated and released in the web noosphere. Does this content have inherent value? Could this content be reused? But also, how much of this content is duplicated?
   
• Outreach to specific research fields
  If you need to get in touch with biologists, physicists or any other specific field, what's the best way of doing it?
   
• Intelligent analysis of medical data
   
• Cultural heritage, multimedia and the semantic web
   
• Measuring and monitoring carbon emissions from everyday actions in life (with specificity in mind rather than just the generic) so that the impact of pro-environmental behaviour change can be better measured.
   
• The role of the internet in engaging pro-environmental behaviour
   
• How to collaborate with computer scientists and end up with something that is documented and robust rather than a proof of principle
   
• Programming courses for researchers in science
  Many researchers want to gain the benefit of developing their own software, but learning how to write good software is difficult. this break out will discuss the how to put together training courses, and will allow people to share recommendation about the courses they have attended.
   
• Making use of high-performance computing infrastructures
  There are local, national and international computing resources that researchers can use, but how do you go about using them?
   
• Challenges in high-throughput data analysis
   
• The role of Virtual Laboratories for Molecular Biodiversity
   
• How can researchers and software developers work together to identify and develop smart, sustainable software solutions?
  This could use the problem of greenhouse emissions and the role played by software development as a case study. Software can be used, for instance: to increase awareness of climate change impacts on the environment, help reduce end user energy demand, influence behaviour by enhancing energy literacy through ICT, or other.
   
• Reconstruction algorithms in x-ray phase contrast contrast tomography
   
• Dealing with large datasets in contrast tomography
   
• Modelling eutectic solidification
   
• Effect of microstructure on melting/freezing temperature
   

Funding and strategy

• Developing the profession of a scientific software engineer
  Can a scientific software engineer develop as a career distinct from that of researcher or academic on the one hand or programmer or computer support on the other? A scientific software engineer would combine professional software development expertise with an ability to deeply and rapidly understand new scientific domains.
   
• How can developing software help your REF2014
  Can software development help your REF2014? We want to capture people's experiences and their ideas.
   
• How do the different research councils fund software, and what plans do they put in place for ensuring it has a future?
  In this break out we want to pool everyone's knowledge of the different research council's software plans (if they exist) and prepare recommendations to feedback to the Research Councils.
   
• Which research council provides the best resources for describing impact?
  Since the Research Councils started asking researchers to describe their research impact, there has been a lot of discussion over the best way of defining the term. Many of the Research Councils provide resources to help researchers describe their own impact. Which are the best resources, and can we help improve them?
   
• Advice on the best approaches to obtaining research funding
  In this break out, we'll discuss people's experiences and advice on obtaining research funding.

Software and open-source projects

• How to operate an open-source software project effectively
  Alistair Mills from the STFC and Steve Crouch from the Software Sustainability Institute will lead a discussion on operating an open-source project and the most effective ways of running and organising these projects.
   
• Prolonging the life of open-source software after initial public funding ceased
  The foremost question on the mind of anyone who is running an open-source software (OSS) project is how to continue the project once initial funding has come to an end. There are many options, but choosing the right one depends on a number of factors. This breakout will discuss the options and share experiences.
   
• Software testing (an often neglected step in software development)
  How do you make sure that your software is doing what it was intended to do?
   
• Software attribution, citation and credit mechanisms
  This breakout will also discuss academic reward environment for those writing/supporting software, software as a legitimate research output, and the role of disclosing/releasing software used in research and development
   
• Practical experiences of collaborative development: what works and what doesn't
  There are a number of difficulties involved with collaborative development between groups, between separate organisations and between open-source developers who might be distributed across the world. This break out will discuss these difficulties and create a list of beat practice ideas.
   
• How do you get information on user numbers, and user feedback on software (walking the tightrope between getting feedback and cyber stalking...)
  How do you know whether your software is popular? By counting your users? Are download numbers a sufficient indicator of software use, or should you count only the instances when software is being used? And how do you do that without infringing your users right to privacy?
   
• Stop writing code for yourself and start writing code for everybody!
   
• Software tools assessment for academia
  Using simulation tools as an example, how do we provide better guidance on assessing tools for usage and for funding focus (emphasising sustainability), and where might coordinated effort be useful in either better assessment frameworks/info. and/or related tool consolidation work? (As a starter, there are factors such as: problem domain, methodology, licencing and development models, current and perceived future funding support, domain-specific vs. general features, support, documentation (user and technical), history-of-usage, underlying software platform, level(s) of abstraction, perceived robustness/scalability/quality of coding, user extensibility.)
   
• What makes research-oriented tools development unique (if anything), and how does this affect software engineering practices which should be applied?
  How do we encourage better software engineering practices for tools development: what are the barriers, and what (if anything) is unique about the research context that demands specific software engineering focuses?
   
• Automated testing of Web Applications
   
• Workflow development
  What are the best ways of developing workflows, the best software to use and how do you avoid the pitfalls. This break out will bring together the people with workflow experience and those who would like to acquire it for a discussion about workflow development.
   
• Introduction to continuous integration
  In this break out, the Institute's Mike Jackson will discuss the merits of continuous integration.
   
• Software development as part of data management plans
  More and more organisations are starting to implement data management plans, but some are overlooking the importance of software. This break out will discuss the importance of software management plans and ways in which they could be implemented.
   
• Best practices for documenting scientific software development
  Documentation: the final frontier. Everyone know that documentation is important, and that it's difficult to write. In this break out, we'll share our experiences of writing documentation and discuss the problems that people have come across whilst writing it.
   
• Tools for deployment and sharing of scientific code
  The potential for developing an ecosystem similar to github and rubygems for research applications

Building a community and dissemination

• Building networks across disciplines
  Cross-disciplinary collaborations are the goal of many projects, but putting such a collaboration together is difficult, In this break out we want to collect people's experiences of setting up cross-disciplinary networks, and capture the advice they would give to others starting their own network.
   
• How to blog, and how to run a blog
  Blogs are an incredibly useful way of communicating up-to-the-minute information about a project (and they're good for the occasional rant about problems too). Getting regular and good content, maintaining editorial control and keeping a blog moving in the right direction can be difficult. Ideas for overcoming these problems will be the focus of this break out.
   
• Bringing together the work of the Institute's Agents and Super Pals, and the SeIUCCR Community Champions
  This break out is open to everyone - not just people from the two community programmes. We want to talk about what the programmes do, how they work, and what we can learn from each other. We also want to discuss how to find good Agents and Super Pals.
   
• Open research: can we move towards open publication for software
  There are many benefits to open publishing of software: it allows full disclosure of the way in which results are generated. Is it worth it? Would people be willing to publish their software? And what's the best way to publish?
   
• Incentives for software publication
   
• Managing copyright and licence issues
   
• Using social networking to increase your impact
  Like it or loathe it, social networking is an important part of publicising project news. But can it be used to increase research impact and, if so, what's the best way of doing this?
   
• Using the internet and social media to better publicise research to the public and within the scientific community
   
• The best journals for publishing software results in each research discipline
  If you have written software to solve a problem in a specific discipline (say, laser physics or medical imaging), where should you publish the results? In this break out we will be looking to draw on the cross-disciplinary background of the attendees and collect suggestions for the best journals to publish in from each research field, and advice on how to find the right journal.