By Devasena Inupakutika and Steve Crouch, Software Sustainability Institute.
By Devasena Inupakutika and Steve Crouch, Software Sustainability Institute, and Richard Bradshaw, University of Southampton.
By Devasena Inupakutika, Steve Crouch and Richard Bradshaw
Computer simulations are a good way to study molecular interactions. There have been striking advances in the application of computer simulation to innovative complex systems that have shed light on phenomena across the breadth of modern chemistry, biology, physics and drug design. ProtoMS (short for Prototype Molecular Simulation) is one such major piece of Monte Carlo biomolecular simulation software. The Software Sustainability Institute is working with ProtoMS developers to review and…
By Steve Crouch, Devasena Inupakutika, Alun Ashton, Mark Basham and Matthew Gerring
Scientific projects are often created as stand alone applications which use their own definitions for algorithms and visualisation tools. This makes it difficult to benefit from other people's work. The DAWN Science project allowed a large group of scientific developers and software engineers to collaborate by developing a single, general purpose API to allow access and sharing of existing algorithms and visualisation tools. This significantly accelerates the development of new…
By Devasena Inupakutika, Software Consultant.
With the advent of data-driven research in the life sciences, researchers have relied on data visualisations to generate hypotheses. Many bioinformatics services providers, such as EMBL-EBI or the NCBI, provide a browser-based environment to do this, as well as new ways to visualise biological data. It is important that the software is both high quality and user friendly, which helps researchers compare and contrast, as well as develop, well grounded conclusions. The Software Sustainability Institute worked with BioJS to review their…
By Devasena Inupakutika, Software Consultant at the Software Sustainability Institute.
The problem with open source software is not that it is free but that some people think this means they have got something for nothing. As an article by MongoDB vice president Matt Asay pointed out, developers really are spoilt these days.
Yet there is no such thing as free software. When we call software "free", it means that it respects the user's essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The source code can…
By Devasena Inupakutika, Software Consultant.
This article is one of the articles in our series Women in Software, in which we hear perspectives on a range of issues related to women who study and work with computers and software.
“Using technology is cool, but I found out today that making it is simply awesome” - these were the words of a 10 year old girl after she took part in the International Women's Day Robotics workshop, and followed a day of experimentation, learning…
By Devasena Inupakutika, Software Consultant.
How do we get more girls involved in science at school, and keep them interested when they go to university? One answer is the STEM Careers Event, which took place at Barton Peveril Sixth Form College last month of this year. Here, students were given a chance to try out a wide range of engaging tasks and find out why and how careers in science and engineering can be exciting and fulfilling for girls too.
Guiding them along were mentors from across the disciplines - including me. I was there with the rest of the Robogals…
By Devasena Inupakutika, Software Consultant at the Software Sustainability Institute.
It was going so well. Your team has just built the software it was asked to, but changing circumstances mean your product is no longer relevant. This is, to say the least, a problem. Your organisation has spent resources, time and – needless to say - money creating a product no one wants anymore. With that in mind, you decide from then on to make a transition to agile software development.
The agile approach has an edge over sequential…
The Software Sustainability Institute works with a range of projects - tackling everything from library searches to nuclear fusion.