Another year has come to an end, and what a year it has been! With the academic holidays approaching, things will be quiet here at the Institute from Thursday 21 December 2023 to Wednesday 3 January 2024.
We would like to take this opportunity to wish our friends and colleagues all the best for the holiday season, and we look forward to another great year in 2024.
If you are not ready to let go of 2023 yet, then keep reading and find out all about our highlights of the year.
Our events
In May, another successful iteration of our popular Collaborations Workshop 2023 (CW23) took place as a hybrid event in Manchester and focused on "Sustainable Career Development for those in the research software community: looking after your software, your career, and yourself."
In June, we hosted the Research Software Camp: FAIR Software, which provided a series of talks and workshops, as well as our mentorship programme.
Our publications
In March, we published the Report on the AHRC Digital/Software Requirements Survey 2021, a survey run by SSI on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI AHRC) community aimed to understand the views on digital/software tools, the experience of developing such tools, the practices, learning intentions, and preferences around how to resource projects involving digital/software.
The Report on the Workshop on Sustainable Software Sustainability 2021 (WoSSS21), which highlights a snapshot of the findings from the October 2021 WoSSS21 workshop around the state of software sustainability efforts, was published in June.
In the same month, an article titled Research software engineering accelerates the translation of biomedical research for health and co-authored by SSI Director Neil Chue Hong and Deputy Director Simon Hettrick, was published in Nature.
In August, we published the SSI Midterm Review, a report that draws together some of the achievements of the SSI since its foundation in 2010. The document comprises 12 case studies that demonstrate the key role that the SSI has played in improving research culture, revolutionising access to software training and working with our collaborators to develop policies that better recognise and support the vital role of software in research.
In November we published a new study titled Understanding the software and data used in the social sciences, which was commissioned by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Our people
In March SSI co-investigator and professor of computer science at the University of Manchester, Carole Goble was included in Research.com's Ranking of Best Scientists in the field of Computer Science and received the Computer Science Leader Award for 2023.
In April SSI Fellow Sammie Buzzard received the IGS Early Career Scientist Award for the year 2022.
In October SSI Communications Lead Selina Aragon was appointed the new SSI Associate Director of Operations.
In November SSI Fellow Professor Tom Crick MBE received the Lovelace Education Medal by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT for his contributions to computer science education across research, policy and practice. Later in December, he was appointed the new Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS).
The Institute
It has also been a year of great changes for the image of the SSI. In April we revealed our new logo and branding and, in October, we launched our brand new website.