University of Cambridge
Interests
As a software engineer working in academia, my interests include "open" in all its popular science-related incarnations:
- Open source software (all scientific software should be open source, peer reviewed, and examinable!)
- Open data (without it, so many great projects couldn't exist)
- Open access (science should be for everyone, not just those who can afford it!)
Alongside this comes a great love of creating usable software and interacting with open communities.
My work
I've working at InterMine, an open source genomics data platform, at the University of Cambridge since 2015. Prior to this, I've worked at academic spin-out jobs and various industry jobs as a software developer and IT Technician. These days I spend most of my time working on BlueGenes, a new user interface for InterMine, as well as spending a lot of time on community outreach.
Working open source made me notice at some point that academic code and software papers often omit any links to the code they're discussing! Once I'd realised this it grew to become a passion of mine. An important part of science is peer review and reproducibility. If one were to submit, say, a mathematics paper, it seems unlikely that the paper would be accepted if the actual mathematical proofs weren't present. So why do people get away with this when it happens with computer code? More importantly, if the code isn't peer reviewed in any way, how can we verify it works or is correct? If the code is wrong, so too is the "science" it produced.
My aim is to promote open source code within the scientific community, particularly aiming to influence funders and journals to require review and open source code. To do this, I intend to attend events with an aim to teach others about these issues and network with relevant contacts, run workshops to help promote culture shift, and creating a "Code is Science" manifesto collaboratively with the community. You can see more of my notes and work at CodeIsScience.com or star my project on GitHub
Online Presence
Follow me on Twitter @yoyehudi
Check out contributions by and mentions of Yo Yehudi on www.software.ac.uk