Research Software Groups

In the third episode of the Nature careers podcast series on workplace technologies, Simon Hettrick, Software Sustainability Institute Deputy Director, tells Julie Gould about the role of research software engineers (RSEs). Simon also talks about the history of the research software engineer as a career path, including the birth of RSE groups and the annual RSE Conference, what they do, how their skills can support researchers with limited coding skills, and how you can become one.

When I first started thinking about how we could create a career path for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in academia, I assumed we would have to persuade university management to change their policies and make it possible, or at least much easier, for researchers to retain RSEs within their groups. The actual solution has been somewhat different, and much more effective.

The first State of the Nation Report for Research Software Engineers provides a history of the RSE campaign and a snapshot of the RSE community as it stands today. If you want to know how a name coined during one of our workshops turned into an 800 strong community which is gathering interest from around the world, then the report is a good place to start.

The Institute's Open Call provides the opportunity for UK researchers to gain software development expertise and effort - for free.

The latest round of the Call has just opened, and we invite research projects from any discipline who would like help with the development of their software to make a submission, and are particularly keen to attract applications from BBSRC and ESRC funding areas. The deadline for submissions is April 29th 2016.

For more information on the Open Call and to submit an application, please visit the Open Call page. You can also find out more about…

By Paul Graham, EPCC and Software Sustainability Institute.

We've been working with Professor Paul Burton and Dr Becca Wilson of the School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol and their software DataSHIELD (Data Aggregation Through Anonymous Summary-statistics from Harmonized Individual levEL Databases). This is a suite of software that enables remote and non-disclosive analysis of sensitive research data. Data providers can use it to make their datasets available for use in analysis without disclosing individual level data itself, and researchers can thus gain…

The Institute's Open Call provides the opportunity for UK researchers to gain software development expertise and effort - for free. The submissions deadline for this round of the Open Call is next week, Wednesday, 30 September 2015.

We invite research projects from any discipline who would like help with the development of their software to make a submission. For more information on the Open Call and to submit an application, please visit the Open Call page. You can also find out more about our current and past projects.

The Institute's Open Call provides the opportunity for UK researchers to gain software development expertise and effort - for free.

The latest round of the Call has just opened, and we invite research projects from any discipline who would like help with the development of their software to make a submission. The deadline for submissions is September 30th 2015.

For more information on the Open Call and to submit an application, please visit the Open Call page. You can also find out more about our current and past projects.

By Paul Graham, EPCC and Software Sustainability Institute.

We have a new project working with Dr Kasper Peeters of Durham University and his software, Cadabra: a computer algebra system which can perform symbolic algebraic computations in classical and quantum field theory. In contrast to other software packages, Cadabra is written with this specific application area in mind, and addresses points where the more general purpose systems are unsuitable or require excessive amounts of additional programming to solve the problems at hand.

Cadabra has extensive functionality for…

The Institute's Open Call provides UK researchers with software development effort and expertise - for free. Researchers can bid for our Research Software Engineers to work on their project for, typically, between one to five months.

The next round of the Open Call will open on 1 July 2015, with a submission deadline of 30 September 2015.

For more information on the Open Call and to submit an application, please visit the Open Call page. You can also find out more about our current and past projects.

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…