Welcome to this month's SSI Fellows Newsletter which shares activities and opportunities taking place within the SSI Fellows' community. Read on for:

• Fellows' Spotlight: Loïc Lannelongue
• July Community Call recap
• Fellows' and related activities
• Upcoming events and calls

Fellows’ Spotlight

Loïc Lannelongue, Research Associate, University of Cambridge

Updates from call 

The call was an opportunity to update the SSI community on the recent launch of Green DiSC, a new certification scheme which provides a roadmap for research groups and institutions who want to tackle the environmental impacts of their computing activities. Three levels of certifications will be available: Bronze, Silver and Gold. The criteria were selected following some key principles: evidence-based, to ensure that the criteria included have the maximum impact on research sustainability while favouring engagement with the framework; open access, so that all scientists can engage with this framework; iterative, so that the criteria developed evolve as institutions’ policies change and our understanding of environmental impacts progresses; community-based, to leverage the great resources being designed internally by different institutions.

Green DiSC was launched at the end of June, and has received very positive feedback from the community, so we are now working on building capacity to be able to onboard as many groups as possible.

• My non-work highlight: Going down the DIY rabbit hole to redecorate the whole house (starting from a very low baseline, putting a picture up on a wall was the most DIY I had done before that)… who knew there were so many different paint brushes, and paint colours?!
• My recommendations:
  • The book Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is a brilliant read to better understand the multiple ways in which modern compute, and AI in particular, affect communities and the environment. The focus on people in particular is striking (if a bit depressing). 
  • And to unwind: the tv show Gray is quite gripping, and a bit different from the usual spy show. 

Community Call Recap

During the July SSI Fellows Community Call, we heard Fellows’ updates from Loïc Lannelongue and Meag Doherty. Loïc‘s presentation, “Green DiSC and the sustainable computing community”, provided an update on his Fellowship project, while Meag talked about life after the Inaugural Fellowship year and how the Fellowship can have an impact on your career. After the presentations, discussions on these topics continued in the break-out rooms. You can watch the recordings of the presentations here.

Fellows’ and related activities

• Ukrainian section in Glosario - via Olexandr Konovalov, University of St Andrews (2014 Fellow): “In summer I have coordinated a student group project to add Ukrainian translation to Glosario - a multilingual glossary for computing and data science terms, established by the Carpentries. We have translated almost 100 terms, and now Ukrainian is in the top 5 most represented in Glosario languages. There are more terms to translate - contributors welcome!”.
• Workshop on the next generation of environmental models - via Sam Harrison, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (2022 Fellow): “SSI Fellow Sam Harrison is coordinating a 4-day retreat in the Lake District this Autumn, with the goal of envisioning the future models of the natural world. Topics will include digital twins, underpinning software engineering and architecture, scalability and optimisation, collaborative development platforms, FAIR software, environmental sustainability of computing, and the impact of AI. Registrations for the workshop are already full (you can still register, but you will be placed on a waiting list), but we have several people involved in the SSI community involved, and I am sure outcomes from the workshop will be of interest to the SSI.”

Upcoming events and calls

• Closing date for applications for SSI Fellowship Programme 2025 - The SSI Fellowship Programme supports people with a passion for software in research with a grant of £4000 to carry out activities to improve and promote good computational practice across all research disciplines. 
• Date: 7 October 2024
• Visit the Fellowship Programme page
• View the launch webinar recording
• Any questions? Contact: fellows-management@software.ac.uk 

Open Science is key for innovation, efficiency, accessibility and transparency. In the last years, many great open science initiatives have been launched in all areas including open access to publications, research data, open-source software, open collaboration, open hardware, open peer review, educational resources, citizen science and even research crowdfunding. Making open science a norm will need to support these button-up initiatives while at the same time making sure to bridge them with other important open science stakeholders such as public policy and decision-makers. This transition to open science can be greatly facilitated by leveraging diplomatic capabilities to bridge national and international interests, which is the realm of a field known as science diplomacy. 

How can science diplomacy support and strengthen the open science movement? How can open science be exploited for decision-making support, knowledge resources and science diplomacy governance frameworks? 

In the last months, in collaboration with the Science Diplomacy Network for Latin America and the Caribbean (DiploCientífica), we have performed a study to shed some light on these questions. This research employed a quantitative survey of 50 organisations promoting open science in Latin America and two qualitative focus groups. Latin America has been a leader in pioneering open access strategies and has shown a significant interest in science diplomacy. The study aims to assess how these organisations use science diplomacy to achieve their goals. By shedding light on the current landscape and dynamics of open science in Latin America, we hope to enhance science diplomacy, facilitate informed decision-making and the formulation of open science policies in the region. 

The study considered three axes in order to map the activities of the organisations in relationship with science diplomacy: 1) “access”, i.e. do their activities secure access to resources through bilateral or multilateral collaborations? 2) “promotion”, i.e. do the organisations promote national or regional open science work in global discussions? And 3) “influence”, i.e. do they interact with society, policymakers, and decision-makers at national or regional levels? The study found that “access” through training activities was the primary contribution of open science actors within the science diplomacy framework. International “promotion” of national and regional open science best practices was the second highest ranked contribution. In that sense, the region’s long-standing tradition of open access to publications and the establishment of open-access repositories is commonly used as an example in the international context. 

We invite you to read this study’s results, where the team also provided a set of recommendations for organisations promoting open science in Latin America and public policy and decision-makers regarding the need for infrastructure, recognition and funding. 

I’ve written before about using AWS for training, and have used this system for courses on the United Kingdom Chemistry and Aerosol (UKCA) model that I develop. This set-up worked well again for a course that I organised recently, where I also learned about the ability of MobaXTerm to have a full graphical connection to the LXDE desktop used by virtual machines. 

A virtual machine as a development environment

Another interesting use for this environment is for testing and development, particularly when wanting to develop code for different types of hardware, such as graphics processing units (GPUs). It can be expensive to buy something new just to run some porting tests, but with cloud computing, you can get access to a wide range of different hardware that can be used to test your code. 

The complicated software stack of the Unified Model means that using this virtual machine environment gives a similar experience to running on HPC resources such as ARCHER2 or Monsoon2, but with the ability to include GPUs as well as CPUs to facilitate porting code to run efficiently on these accelerators. Work to do this had been funded by the ExCALIBUR programme, and because of this UKCA now has had a large number of its routines offloaded to NVIDIA-based GPUs using OpenACC. This initial porting work was done on Amazon EC2 instances.

Is there a cheaper option?

However, using cloud computing can be expensive, especially if you want to use more esoteric hardware or lots of GPUs, and what if you already have a server somewhere with a suitable graphics card that you could make use of? The Met Office virtual machine configuration makes use of Vagrant and VirtualBox as standard and, unfortunately, VirtualBox doesn’t allow the “guest” machines that have been virtualised to access the “host’s” GPU. I had also enabled the use of VMware Workstation Player, another virtualisation method, to work with this system but this also does not have the capability for virtual machines to access the GPU.

However, a solution can be found in libvirt, a toolkit to manage virtualisation platforms that does allow for PCI passthrough for the GPU and works with Vagrant using the QEMU machine emulator and virtualiser. Some set-up is required to enable this though. The BIOS settings will need to be updated to allow for this virtualisation using the Intel Direct IO option, and the kernel options for the GPU addresses need to be determined and set so that this GPU can be used exclusively by the guest machine. A second GPU may be required for the host server as well, as it wouldn’t have any display output otherwise.

Once the hardware addresses of the GPU have been determined, for instance by using lspci for a GNU/Linux host, it is then straightforward to point to these in your Vagrantfile to enable GPU passthrough. Once your guest is up and running you can install the necessary drivers and utilities, such as nvidia-smi, and compilers to enable you to run the software you need on your GPU-enabled virtual machine. For the Unified Model, this also involved compiling up the netCDF libraries and other dependencies using the NVIDIA compiler suite. 

Is it worth it?

Even though cloud computing can be expensive, is it really worth going through the effort to configure this on an existing server? There were a lot of steps to complete to get a working system and once it has been configured only one virtual machine can access the GPU at a time. Additionally, the host operating system cannot use the GPU at all. It is also restricted to the GPU you have: my system had an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 and ideally the development work I was doing required access to multiple V100s or A100s. As an alternative, supercomputing systems such as Isambard, JASMIN, DAWN, and now ARCHER2 provide access to compute nodes with multiple GPUs from NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. While it was satisfying to be able to set up this environment on my local server, in the end, larger hardware systems were the better option.

Since becoming an SSI Fellow in 2023, I have chatted with other Fellows and attended the Collaborations Workshops, which gave me many ideas I had not thought about in my Fellowship plans. Meanwhile, within my role at UKCEH, colleagues in the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC), a NERC EDS data centre, have started receiving requests to deposit model codes and are beginning to think more about how to curate and promote environmental model codes of long-term value. This open question led to discussions about the potential of bringing together data centres, software engineers, environmental modellers, and other practitioners for an ideation workshop to come up with principles to promote environmental model code of long-term value.

The event

The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) has hosted on behalf of NERC Environmental Data Services (NERC-EDS) a workshop on the long-term value of environmental code on 21st November 2023. This workshop was funded and supported by the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship award. 38 people registered for the hybrid workshop, with a good mixture of modellers, data managers or data stewards, data scientists, and research software engineers from different environmental science sub-disciplines. Among those who attended are SSI fellows Tom Russell, James Bryne, and Sam Harrison.

The workshop began with a keynote talk by Prof Chris Jewell (Lancaster University) on “The Generalised Epidemic Modelling (GEM) project: automating real-time infectious disease analysis“ and its role in COVID-19 modelling and reporting. The role of reproducible workflow and cyberinfrastructure was highlighted, and a new high-level modelling language (based on Python) for epidemic modelling was introduced.

This was followed by 8 lightning talks, covering a range of topics and experiences. It is encouraging to see that many in our community have already thought deeply about this topic and are enthusiastic to further this goal.

The rest of the day comprised breakout discussions on the FAIR requirements of environmental model code of long-term value. One striking observation is that many of the suggestions are in alignment with the recently published FAIR for research software principles (FAIR4RS). 

A continuing conversation

This event marks the start of a conversation on fostering the long-term value of environmental model code. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with me or any of the SSI Fellows mentioned above. A follow-on blog post will highlight some of the findings of this workshop.

Workshop report

The workshop report is now published in Zenodo and NORA (NERC Open Research Archive).

In this article, I want to chart the course that led me to run the Software in Polar Science event as part of my Fellowship and share what I’ve learned along the way, especially as a result of being an RSE and SSI Fellow.

I applied twice to be a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, in 2021 and 2022. Now in 2024 the original motivations are lost to me, but it’s really illuminating to return to the presentations to see what motivated both me and the work (though you’d have to pay me handsomely to watch the videos from 2021 or 2022 again, as hearing my voice is cringe-inducing). 

The first time I applied, I was already five years into my journey to become a research software engineer. This term means a lot more to me now than it did then. This is the first thing that applying for software-related funding afforded me: the context of the problem and the roles surrounding research software. At the time, I was a support engineer looking after disk platforms, HPC and systems across the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), having originally started with developing operational data management systems in Antarctica (you can find the obligatory link to photos here). The Natural Environment Research Council was shifting (though I didn’t have that broad a view at the time) towards awareness of digital and I was exercising my reasonably long career as a software developer to (a) be a pain in the neck and (b) help carve out the role of software engineers (not necessarily limited to research compute) in the organisation. I should add that many, including but not limited to senior research and technical staff, were aware of a need for it, but struggled to develop the sentiment, narrative or business case for it. 

To that end, I had applied for the EPSRC RSE Fellowship, which I didn’t get, and tried to bolster my agenda through the SSI Fellowship (an organisation I knew little about), which I also didn’t get. I won’t lie in saying that the future of my role as a software engineer in an organisation that didn’t explicitly have that capacity looked bleak, especially given the friction I was causing working outside the role I was employed for. Even more so as I had come from an industry that was far more financially rewarding, though at the expense of variety and innovation.

This is where I learned my second lesson about the research world: simple undertakings have chaotic effects, (from experience I know) much more easily than in industry. At this point, I had positioned myself to head up projects within IT at BAS, as well as contribute existing knowledge. I had also used a simple approach to software engineering to build a tool that really helps our researchers interact with the HPC at scale. My RSE Fellowship application had been noticed by our science director and the head of the newish AI Lab (who I was regularly supporting), and I had practised applying for funding applications.

RSEs were now on the radar as something we needed to employ and I was in the fortunate position of having shown what they could do for BAS already. We definitely didn’t have a massive deployment of investment and a sudden influx of technical staff (sans strategy), but we did open an RSE role, which I applied for and got by describing educating on six simple engineering practices as key to improving software sustainability and collaboration: architectural design, iterating development, coding style guidance, interface development, debugging and optimisation strategies, and defining workflows. 

Later, I got the SSI Fellowship. The difference between 2021 and 2022 is that I had an agenda to carve out software engineering as a practice. The community at the SSI offered me opportunities to engage. I created my profile on the SSI website and presented at the first Collaboration Workshop I attended on a concept I thought translated from my industry experience to research software. This was one of the best things I did as it taught me the third important lesson of my research software experience: that you should offer information freely. Saving face is pointless if not doing so helps others understand new concepts. I try my best to undertake my role(s) this way, even if I don’t always manage it (it’s hard to evaluate your own performance!)

To that end, I undertook a wave of public-facing activities thanks to this Fellowship that are imperative for a researcher, but you wouldn’t have to bother with in a corporate role. I spoke on a Code for Thought episode and co-wrote a blog at CW22 (Visibility of Research Software Engineers in research funding) and CW23 (Tracking the environmental impact of research computing). I particularly enjoyed the latter due to the importance of the subject and the wonderful group effort involved). I tried to engage this open discourse about what I was doing through SSI blog posts such as Lessons from my SSI Fellowship: first half(ish) and Collaborations Workshop 2023 live blog. 

Finally, I spent most of 2023 trying to fulfil (at first unsuccessfully in October ‘23 and then successfully in February ‘24) my Fellowship goal: “Using the Fellowship funding I propose to run a public, hybrid webinar for RSE/AI communities with talks”. This was, I’m not unashamed to say, something I found a complete departure from what I like doing, but that I felt really needed to be achieved if I was truly living up to “acting as the public BAS champion of software in Polar Science”, which is what I said I wanted to achieve with the Fellowship and my RSE role. That event ran on the 6th and 7th February and is described in this blog post. The net benefit of that is outstanding but chaotic, and I’m bloody happy I stuck to the goal I set myself despite moaning about having to live up to the expectation I set myself. At the beginning of this year, I was happily involved with the professionals working on the Collaborations Workshop 2024 (CW24) steering committee.

What I haven’t mentioned is how the chaotic outcomes translated into my role. Well, by undertaking all this and trying to be a software engineering champion, I got involved with polar research software engineering as a role. In doing that, I proved that RSEs play an important role in research, which since has led to the formation of a small team (as of late 2023), which I can now try to shape with my evil, domineering (no, no, wait, stream of consciousness, whoops…), kindly and benevolent software engineering agenda. 

This is another lesson: if you have an agenda that is for the good of others and work to fulfil it, those activities will ultimately be beneficial even if they’re not planned from the outset. The agenda is important, but how you fulfil it is not always driven by your agenda but by a broader set of influences and making the best of the situation.

So now that I lead a Digital Innovation Team full of diverse skillsets, both digital and non-digital, and have to consider those wider implications of what we do, I’m trying to work out what the agenda is. What do I concentrate on? What do I ignore, delegate or get engrossed in? How should I help people now that I have line management responsibility? How, most of all, should I communicate now that I’m getting older and looking at the personal implications of what I’ve done, right or wrong, throughout my lifetime?

What small impact can I deliver before I’m no longer capable of working, due to tiredness, health or other life influences? 

The last observation I make now, as I’m in a new decade of my life (you guess) and have accepted (as industry never got me to do this) line management as a role I will at least try to be successful at, is that it pays to write, to describe, to reflect upon the timespan of your endeavours. I didn’t realise how consistent my agenda was and it hasn’t changed much, but I didn’t realise until writing this how much the things I’ve done in roughly three years have formed me. The approach has changed though, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop being an SSI Fellow in my heart, but I need to look at how the outcomes from this period can really benefit others, so my future activities will be very different from what they were in 2021.

I was lucky to become an SSI fellow in 2022, (you can read a much longer article all about the journey that led through to this event here). I was definitely ambitious when I applied in speculating that during my fellowship (directly quoted from my fellowship screencast) I could:

• “[act] as the public BAS champion of software in Polar Science”
• “[publicise] BAS open source efforts and ongoing/future research”
• “[contribute and adopt,] within BAS[,] tools from other areas”

Apparently, I was not a fan of commas at the time. I can take some heart in having achieved these objectives, to a greater or lesser extent, which will perhaps be the topic of another blog post. I won’t go into the activities I proposed, but there was one very clear goal, which I regretted ever suggesting, because it totally wasn’t my thing, to...

...”[use] the fellowship funding I propose to run a public, hybrid webinar for RSE/AI communities with talks covering (i) the use of data driven software…; (ii) the increasing adoption and importance of software in computational modelling and data analysis within polar science; (iii) talks/discussions/Q&A sessions on software oriented projects [within BAS]; and (iv) Discuss sustainable software in a polar operational context, especially when considering contribution to broader sustainability goals.”

What the hell was I thinking!?

Anyway, this all gets even funnier when you appreciate that in 2022, purely through chance and the side-stepping of various others, I ended up collaborating with some amazing folks at the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3) to deliver Open Science and Sustainable Software for Data-driven Discovery. Perfect, I could use this as a satisfactory achievement of my fellowship objective. Phew, the deal is done. 

Except… I didn’t plan to acknowledge this immediately and I am often forgetful. When I don’t like the experience of having done something, I’ll shut it out of my mind. The event went well, especially considering it was in the worst heatwave the UK had ever seen at the time, (cue the novelty of storing ice lollies in a minus-eighty degree freezer used for ice cores). But… I didn’t use the fellowship funds or write a blog about it afterwards and come 2023 I started planning a new training and conference-style hybrid event that accurately met the goal I’d set myself for the SSI Fellowship. I was unwound by my own lack of ingenuity and duplicity.

For some reason when I write these blog posts, I feel they probably have more value if you can take something away from them to use in your own experiences. Organising this event, I learned two key things: always be prepared to reschedule if you don’t feel it’s going to work, and it can take ten minutes to create a viable plan and then others can happily help you through delegation.

The first instance of this event, Software in Polar Science 2023, was meant to be in October. But things got very busy with the hiring of new staff for a newly established RSE team. My personal life was also unyielding to overwork (which is never a bad thing) and I was too cognitively overloaded to have any chance of “having a vision” (which, as a further piece of advice, you should always have for anything you need to plan). It is never a problem, especially relatively early on, to throw your hands up and say, “we need to move this”. I found my wonderful collaborators not only actively supportive, but happier with this change, which goes to show it’s never as dramatic as it seems. 

In the end, we delivered the event in February 2024. The website was an important first point of call: having a singular point of reference means you can share your vision with others, it’s not just for the attendees but those involved in the organisation. We split the event into a training day and a “networking and showcasing” day. This allowed us to ensure that people could come and get something out of it that was concrete and allowed us to use the fellowship funds concretely to offer something for nothing to those who might not otherwise attend. This turned out to be a problem, as some people treat that trivially and don’t turn up, so there does need to be a safeguard to ensure places go to those who are willing to actually attend the event, but that’s another lesson learned.

I didn’t deliver the event, we did. The benefit of painting the vision for it via a simple website was that lots of enthusiastic people (probably more so than me in all honesty) got on board and made it all happen. What’s most interesting about this is that I just had to let the delegation of tasks happen, offering some guidance now and then (again, vision). Others benefited from undertaking certain tasks more than I would have because it connected people and exposed them to new things that brought them benefit. Delegation isn’t (just) about “slopey-shouldering” effort to others, but about empowering others to acquire the experiences you yourself take for granted. 

As the overall navigator on this "vision quest" I could still get the experiences I wanted. One of these was to organise two Carpentries sessions: the first an incubated session on data science oriented python as a test (of both our ability to deliver them, the notion of doing them hybrid and my experience as a certified instructor) and the second on basic introduction to python skills on the first day of the event. Both were delivered and are now helping us structure a collaborative and community-led training and development programme within BAS.

The second day was much more about giving software exposure from within BAS, as well as giving those producing exposure to the sustainability causes and resources I’ve been exposed from the community: the all-important bidirectional knowledge share. Shoaib Sufi, the SSI community lead, totally bolstered and amplified the ethos of the event with the keynote on the role of sustainable software in research. The panel discussion brought Shoaib together with others who help to guide me on my journey around the research domain as a software engineer. Despite my ending up compering (a better candidate was scheduled, trust me) and the panel being a person down (a wonderful SSI fellow, Sadie Bartholemew, whose opinion I really wanted included was unable to attend), we hopefully promoted some interesting discussion around “polar science communities seek[ing] to engage with the fast changing, multidisciplinary sustainable software landscape”. Thanks to Shoaib, the panel members Scott Hosking and Alden Conner, and the BAS innovation director Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley for setting the scene with the opening remarks.

The most positive outcome undoubtedly goes to the showcasing of software in polar science. We had showcases from our polar oceans, space weather and artificial intelligence research teams, but also operational science showcases from the polar data centre, mapping and geographic information centre, antarctic marine engineering and our local collaborators Cambridge University’ Institute of Computing for Climate Science. The showcases really seemed to bolster conversation, create a sense of shared community and highlight why someone should run events like this. 

I hope it’s not the last of these events, but events management is definitely not my bag. However, being bold (and stupid (and stubborn)) does sometimes pay off, hopefully this is the start of a broader set of showcases that can be linked up with broader communities, we only scratched the surface. 

And I do mean we, the showcases were organised by Bryn Ubald, one of the new RSEs I’ve been lucky enough to add to our new Digital Innovation Team at BAS and Polina Sevastyanova from our innovation and impact team (yes, the two teams are massively intertwined, that’s a work in progress since we found a place for RSEs to sit). Both they and especially Lisa and Ellen at C2D3 for the administrative burdens and advice they provided and Pilvi and the BAS IT department for the conference centre setup and system, were instrumental in this coming off. 

Why am I telling you all this? Because it shows how many people should be involved in something like this to make it work well. Don’t be afraid to let go and let things organise, who knows what you and others might learn from the experience!

(I definitely learned I’m not doing this again in a hurry… probably.)

R-Ladies Edinburgh were launched in October 2018 by a team of enthusiastic local organisers. Between 2018 and 2021, the group hosted 18 events - most initial events were in-person, but during lockdowns in 2020-21 they were moved online. In 2021, R-Ladies Edinburgh went a bit quiet, as some organisers left and others became very busy with other projects. 

I was involved in R-Ladies Edinburgh from the start - first as a participant, and then as a co-organiser of online meetups where we analysed tidytuesday data together. I considered stepping up as a co-organiser back in 2021, but did not feel that I could take it on at that time (I was just changing jobs and life was just too busy). Receiving the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship for 2023 provided the impetus I needed, and reviving R-Ladies Edinburgh became one of my main Fellowship goals. 

Serendipitously, I found out on Twitter about a colleague, Alessia Calafiore, who recently joined the Edinburgh College of Art (part of the University of Edinburgh) and used R for spatial analysis. We met for coffee and she agreed to be the speaker at the R-Ladies relaunch event. We discussed dates and agreed that it would be nice to hold the event near International Women’s Day - we settled on 9th March as the date. The format would be an interactive talk, followed by unstructured time for networking over drinks and snacks. 

During the event, Alessia discussed the basics of processing and visualising spatial data with R - she presented these topics in a way that was accessible for people who never analysed spatial data before (such as myself). She then presented a case study focused on the gender pay gap in Scotland - she used the 2011 Census data to calculate the proportion of women compared to men in the most senior professional category (C1), and showed us how to build a map illustrating this proportion in each electoral ward in Scotland. Alessia’s presentation (including all the data, code and explanation) can be found HERE. I immediately had ideas about how I could incorporate building maps into my teaching - I already asked my students to analyse Census data, and I think we could easily incorporate a bit of teaching about maps, to provide the students with another visualisation tool.

There were 14 enthusiastic R-Ladies in attendance, many from the University of Edinburgh, but also some from other organisations (e.g. Forest Research). After Alessia’s talk, most of us stayed and chatted about our experiences in academia, the process of learning and using R, and the different tools that we use to help in our research and coding practice (e.g. GitHub and Obsidian). 

If you would like to join us (as a participant or as a speaker), please check out our Meetup page and join the group. 

In my day job, I am a data science educator, spending most of my time designing and delivering teaching in a university context. I have an amazing team of colleagues who work in similar roles, and we spend lots of time talking about how best to teach coding. We also love to talk to people from outside of our team - to learn about how they teach, and to share some of our tried and tested practices. This is how the University of Edinburgh Pair Programming Group was born, and it has been a vibrant community for over 3 years now. But, why stop there? Why not engage the wider community and bring together people from further out in the UK and beyond? Well, indeed, why not?

When I was applying for the SSI Fellowship back in 2022, this event was not in my proposal. Even in my wildest dreams, I didn’t think it could be pulled off - a full-day hybrid event about teaching programming, attended by over 60 in-person and about 50 online participants, featuring 5 keynote speakers and 20 presentations, delivered as a collaboration between 3 organisations. The unbelievable thing is that the idea was born on one cold October evening in 2023, and came to fruition on 11th January 2024 - with about 3 months lead time. Yes, we did it, thanks to an extremely effective collaboration between about 10 infinitely capable and enthusiastic colleagues, high-quality infrastructure provided by the University of Edinburgh, and just under £2000 of funding (some provided as part of my SSI Fellowship). 

I won’t focus this blog post on the programme of the event - I will just say that it was focused on teaching programming to non-programmers (i.e. outside of Computer Science or Informatics departments). You can see the full programme (including slides and eventually videos) HERE. What I will focus on instead are my high-level learnings from the event - both as a co-organiser and as an attendee.

Organisers in a joyful mood as we welcomed 110+ participants

The size of the community

When we sent the initial call for event participants, we weren’t sure whether we should expect 10 or a 1000 responses. We had no idea about the number of people who are interested in teaching programming to non-programmers, and how many of them we could reach through our networks. We ended up receiving just under 150 responses. I am confident, however, that the next call would attract many more - we only advertised for about 3 weeks, and I’m sure there are networks that we didn’t manage to reach.

The spirit of the community

Out of the 147 initial notes of interest, about 110 people participated on the day. In marketing speak, this is called conversion rate, and I think ours was remarkable, especially considering that this was a free event (i.e. didn’t require a financial commitment), taking up a full day during a period that is for many academics very busy with teaching. The people who did participate gave it their all - there was a tangible buzz in the room during the sessions, lots of great conversations happening over lunch, and a great atmosphere in the Zoom chat room. Of the 60 in-person participants, 40 stayed for a networking reception after the event, and a further 20 stayed for pizza and more chats. Two of the keynote speakers, Olivia Guest and Sam Forbes, are SSI Fellows as well, and I have to confess that this fact helped me get the courage to approach them and ask for a talk. They were lovely and enthusiastic and gave a talk about inclusivity in coding, which I think is key to teaching programming anywhere. 

Keynote lecture about to start

The future of the community

During the event, I pitched the idea of writing an edited volume about teaching programming to non-programmers, and in true Collaborations Workshop spirit, I invited people to add their potential contributions to a shared Google spreadsheet. We have about 40 ideas there, and over the next months, we’ll be working to put together a book proposal and start the project. One of the keynote speakers suggested a hackathon to get us started, and I think this is a wonderful idea that we’ll try to implement. In the event feedback, we received lots of requests to run similar events in the future, and to make them longer, perhaps extending over 2 days. We would love to do this - it will largely depend on funding and capacity in the team. Overall, this was an amazing event that brought the community together and will definitely result in a set of extended collaborations. 

Pair programming in action

Founded in 2009, the Fab Foundation emerged to promote and support the growth of the worldwide fab lab network and the creation of regional capacity-building organisations. Originating from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms Fab Lab programme, the foundation's mission is centred on providing access to tools, knowledge, and financial resources to facilitate education, innovation, and invention through technology and digital fabrication. This empowers individuals to create (almost) anything, opening up opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods on a global scale. The primary recipients of the Fab Foundation's support are community organisations, educational institutions, and non-profit entities. 

To raise awareness about the Fab community, the Fab Foundation organises various events worldwide, and in July 2023, I had the chance to participate in one such event: FAB23 in Thimphu, Bhutan. Besides exploring the Fab community, my purpose in attending this event was to gain insights into the intersections between the Fab community and the Research Software community. Throughout the conference, I attended three workshops in the Technology (R&D) track which helped me understand how (research) software plays an important role in the Fab community.

My FAB23 badge

The first hands-on workshop was titled “The quest for the data workbench; a journey from Bhutan to Jupyter (and back), challenged by Pythons and Pandas” led by Pieter van der Hijden. The motivation for this workshop originated from the insights gained at the "Fablabs and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)" Working Group, focusing on the role of data in driving machines, managing fablabs, overseeing the Fab Lab network, and examining the environment to identify areas where a positive impact can be achieved. During the session, participants from a variety of fablabs and backgrounds engaged in collaborative learning, each working on their Jupyter Notebook to explore interactive Python, Pandas, Markdown documentation, and develop a simple application. The session concluded with the sharing of thoughts, findings, and discussions on how to offer mutual support in the future.

Workshop on “The quest for the data workbench; a journey from Bhutan to Jupyter (and back), challenged by Pythons and Pandas”

Following this session, we invited Pieter as a guest for RSE Asia’s community call where he led a discussion on “The Quest for the Data Workbench: How to bridge the gap between the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Fablab/Maker Movement?”

Data Workbench Processes

The second workshop at FAB23 that centred on software implementation was titled “Building smart projects with TinyML using EdgeImpulse and Blues Wireless,” organised by Salman Faris for those interested in the intersection of machine learning and electronics. This workshop delved into the concepts of TinyML, focusing on deploying machine learning models on microcontrollers with limited resources. The session included a discussion on how TinyML can enhance intelligence and autonomy in various electronic devices, spanning wearables, smart sensors, IoT devices, and more. Exploring the EdgeImpulse platform, participants were introduced to its user-friendly interface for designing and training TinyML models. The workshop covered aspects such as collecting and preprocessing sensor data, creating machine learning models using popular algorithms, and evaluating their performance. Techniques for optimising TinyML models for deployment on resource-constrained microcontrollers were also discussed. Practical examples illustrated how TinyML and electronics can be combined for projects like gesture recognition, voice-controlled devices, environmental sensing, and others. Step-by-step demonstrations were provided to showcase the integration of TinyML models trained with EdgeImpulse into electronic prototypes, showcasing the potential of this combination.

The third hands-on workshop titled “How to add machine learning to almost anything?” was organised by Eric Pan and Violet Su. During this workshop, participants delved into machine learning applications on the widely used embedded AI device, Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense. This compact yet powerful tool serves as an ideal entry point for those venturing into intelligent voice and vision AI. Attendees received a unit of XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, enabling them to explore the world of embedded AI. The workshop offered an introduction to various projects leveraging embedded AI, hands-on experiences to test different functionalities, and provided inspiration, insights, and resources to empower participants to construct their own models for future embedded AI projects.

Workshop on “How to add machine learning to almost anything?”

Conclusion

Overall, my experience at FAB23 provided insights into the important role of software in the Fab community. The workshops showcased how (research) software contributes to innovation and sustainability within the Fab ecosystem, creating an intersection of technology, digital fabrication, and software development. The collaborative spirit and exchange of ideas during the sessions emphasised the potential for further synergies between the Fab and Research Software communities, opening doors to new possibilities and avenues for collaboration.

A sunflower in Bhutan

SSI Fellow Peter Schmidt is the host and creator of the Code For Thought podcast, the community podcast for research software engineers and researchers who code. 

Here is a full list of the April episodes:

scikit-learn: Software is People

scikit-learn is a highly successful and popular Python library for data science and machine learning. It is open source and has a large contributor base. 

Peter had the pleasure to meet with some of the scikit-learn team to talk about how they got involved and how it is possible to run an Open Source project of this size and scale. 

Lecturers without Borders - Eugenia Covernton

Lecturers without Borders wants to bring scientists and school students together. It is an exciting project and for this episode Peter talked to Eugenia Covernton, who's leading the non-profit organisation. 

So, if you are a travelling researcher or RSE, or even if you want to do it from the comfort of your home, LeWiBo gives you an opportunity to share your work in schools.

Make computing GREENER - Loïc Lannelongue

How can we make computing environmentally more sustainable? Meet Loïc Lannelongue, who - together with Michael Inouye - created the Green Algorithms project. Amongst other things, it allows us to estimate the carbon footprint of our algorithms and computing jobs. 

The project has been awarded the HDR UK Susannah Boddie Award for Impact of the Year in March 2024. 

The making of a diveRSE community - Jeremy Cohen, Michael McLeod

In this episode, Peter talks about two different aspects of diversity in tech and research software engineering in particular. First, we hear from Jeremy Cohen, who has been running the DiveRSE seminar series since 2022 and is the co-author of a paper on the subject (link below). Then I talk to Michael McLeod, who is telling us about the role LGBTQ+ people play in tech. 

ByteSized RSE: Property Based Testing - Duncan McGregor and Nicholas del Grosso

Property based testing can help you make your tests more effective and your code more robust. Together with Duncan McGregor and Nicholas del Grosso, Peter talks about what property based testing is and in particular goes into one widely used implementation for Python - the Hypothesis library.