News

By Mike Jackson.

The Institute was invited to this year’s Dev8D to run a sustainability session. On 14 February I took the train to London to attend this popular developer-centric event, which is funded by the JISC via DevCSI and held at the University of London Union. Feel free to read my trip report which describes how our sustainability session went, the sessions I attended, the software I played with and suggestions for things the Institute could do to.

The JISC has appointed Sero Consulting Ltd to undertake a review of the National Grid Service (NGS) to assess the business options for sustainable services. The review, which will report in mid-February, will support the development of a business model and will determine in what areas the NGS may have to change to meet expectations of researchers and other stakeholders.

The Collaborations Workshop gets researchers and software developers working together to solve research problems. If you’re a researcher who wants to make more of software, or a developer who wants to work with researchers, the workshop is the perfect opportunity to meet new collaborators.

The Collaborations Workshop will be held on 21-22 March at Queen’s College, Oxford.

Registration is now open.

For more information, visit the Collaborations Workshop website.

Meet with researchers and software developers

A fresh perspective can help solve problems or come up with new ideas. The workshop brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, and software developers with experience of working for the research community. It is this variety of backgrounds that makes the workshop productive.

Visit the website to see who’s attending.

You control the agenda

The workshop is split into a series of discussion sessions. As a delegate, you can nominate topics for discussion: anything from a problem specific to your research, to an issue that affects the entire research community. We will then discuss the topic and try to find solutions.

Visit the website to see the discussion topics that have been suggested so far.

Everything is flexible

Everything about the workshop is flexible. Delegates are in control of the agenda and can change it to meet their needs. If you want time to present results, time will be found. If more time is needed for a discussion, it will be added.

Visit the website to see the agenda.

Everything is open

Information on the planning of the workshop, the agenda items, the presentations, the reporting-back sessions, and post-workshop progress will all be available on the CW12 website.

More information

For more information, visit the Collaborations Workshop website, or send us an info [at] software [dot] ac [dot] uk (email).

IWSG-Life'12 (23-25 May 2012) will bring together scientists from the field of life sciences, bioinformatics and computer science. The aim is to exchange experience, formulate ideas and introduce up-to-date technological advances in molecular and systems biology in the context of Science Gateways.

The paper submission deadline has now been extended to 30 January 2012.

Visit the conference website.

Everyone at the Software Sustainability Institute wishes you the very best for the festive season.

We are now taking a break until 4th January.

Have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
 

The MAUS project is developing software for analysing a new neutrino source, which will be built in the UK. The Institute's Mike Jackson has been helping MAUS to develop online data quality, which will allow physicists to assess the quality of their data in real time.

A live, end-to-end run of all the components Mike has helped to develop has just been completed. The software takes data from neutrino sensors, processes it using Celery workers, stores it in a MongoDB document-oriented database, and converts the data into a histogram that is displayed via a Django web interface.

It sounds like a lot of work for a histogram, but it's an important histogram!

The Collaborations Workshop 2012 (CW12) brings together researchers and software developers, so that they can share information, network, solve problems and start new collaborations. The two-day workshop provides attendees with everything they need to work together, and is completely flexible so that the attendees control what they talk about and what they work on.

The CW12 will be held at Queen's College, Oxford on 21-22 March 2012.

More information will be added to the workshop website in the new year and registration will open in January 2012.

The BBSRC are seeking proposals for their Tools and Resources development fund which is intended to support small or short-duration, pump-priming (pilot) projects that enable excellent bioscience.

The IEEE Computer Society is seeking public review comments for Version 3 of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). This guide spells out components of the software engineering discipline, promoting a consistent view of software engineering worldwide. To review the latest guide, visit the review site.

The IEEE Computer Society’s two software development certifications—the Certified Software Development Associate (CSDA) for entry-level developers and the Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) credential for mid-career professionals are both based on the SWEBOK Guide. The CSDA and the CSDP are the first two certifications that conform to the ISO/IEC 24773 standard, which stipulates methods of certifying software engineering professionals worldwide.

The newest version of the SWEBOK Guide includes new topic areas, updated topic descriptions, and retirement of topics that are no longer relevant. Five new knowledge areas (KAs) provide a guide to foundational knowledge in software engineering. The new guide will feature better integration of the related disciplines, and renaming and distribution of some material into different knowledge areas.

Software practitioners worldwide participate in the Guide’s development to ensure that it captures established traditional practices recommended by many organizations. The SWEBOK Guide uses a rigorous process that includes successive levels of review. Each of the fifteen KAs will be published as they become available for review. Three knowledge areas are now available for review: Software Construction, Software Configuration Management, and Computing Foundations.

The deadline for review comments on these areas is 6 January, 2012. For more information, contact d [dot] fairley [at] computer [dot] org (Dick Fairley), chair of the SWEBOK V3 Change Control Board.

For more details, visit the IEEE website.

Software is a cornerstone of science. Without software, twenty-first century science would be impossible. Without better software, science cannot progress. But the culture and institutions of science have not yet adjusted to this reality. The signatories to the Science Code Manifesto aim to reform and address this challenge, by adopting five principles:

Code

All source code written specifically to process data for a published paper must be available to the reviewers and readers of the paper.

Copyright

The copyright ownership and license of any released source code must be clearly stated.

Citation

Researchers who use or adapt science source code in their research must credit the code’s creators in resulting publications.

Credit

Software contributions must be included in systems of scientific assessment, credit, and recognition.

Curation

Source code must remain available, linked to related materials, for the useful lifetime of the publication.

Founding signatories

Nick Barnes, Climate Code Foundation; David Jones, Climate Code Foundation; Peter Norvig, Director of Research Google Inc; Cameron Neylon, Science in the Open; Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation; Joseph Jackson, Open Science Alliance; Victoria Stodden, Columbia University; Peter Suber, Berkman Fellow Harvard University.