Posted by s.sufi on 7 March 2013 - 11:47am 

By Shoaib Sufi, Community Manager, Software Sustainability Institute

Connecting developers and researchers together can often be a problem. After all, researchers are often too busy and developers have demanding priorities of their own.

One solution comes in the form of the Collaborations Workshop (CW), which brings together these two disparate groups. Here researchers can network with the programmers they need to develop software for demanding projects, while developers get the chance to advise and assist on research problem, perhaps as a prelude to funded work. Both groups also learn how to work effectively with the other and how software can increase the speed of ideas to publications.

It’s not just developers and researchers who benefit from the CW. Funders gain an understanding of where the zeitgeist is in interdisciplinary research and therefore what might be the next big thing to support. Managers, meanwhile, learn to more effectively bring together researchers and developers for mutual benefit.

Other subjects discussed at the workshop will be how best to acknowledge the role of software and developers in research, the current state of play regarding current models of research, and possible future developments, as well as several breakout sessions.

In attendance will be researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including 3D imaging, epidemiology, computing in education, glaciology, snow physics, space weather, satellite imaging and textual classification. There will also be senior developers who will be demonstrating how computational modeling and porting to HPC resources can benefit researchers.

Who will be attending? In addition to groups and representatives from organisations such as the Universities of Bath, Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford, as well as Imperial College and UCL, several of Software Sustainability Institute’s fellows will be attendance, and there will be many opportunities to make new contacts and begin collaborations with both researchers and developers.

To attend, just go to the registration page, and be sure to spread the word!