On Thursday 12th of December the Research Computing Service joined the College’s Research Software Community in celebrating the 1st Research Software Winter Seminars and Roundtable, the final event of another great year of building research software at Imperial. The event had two goals: first, to celebrate the research software-related achievements of the RS Community during 2019, and second, to plan the activities and goals for the year that is about to start.
The seminar session featured nine exciting talks, ranging from a review of the activities of the Community during 2019 and the training opportunities in computing and data science skills, to technical talks on the use of complex analysis pipelines for RNA sequencing and the extension of open source software with custom features.
This is the full list of talks, including several relevant links:
- Jeremy Cohen (Department of Computing) – Another successful year for Imperial’s Research Software Community – 2019 in review
- Katerina Michalickova (Research Computing Service) – Research Computing and Data Science Skills Training at Imperial (Computational Methods Hub, Graduate School Research Computing and Data Science Programme)
- Chris Cave-Ayland (Research Computing Service) – Graduate School Courses for Research Software Engineering (registration)
- Loic Salles (Department of Mechanical Engineering) – Software for Computational Vibration
- Combiz Khozoie (Department of Brain Sciences) – scflow: a Reproducible and Scalable Analysis Pipeline for Single-Cell RNA-Sequencing Data
- Diego Alonso-Álvarez (Research Computing Service) – Research References Tracking Tool (R2T2)
- Felipe Huerta Perez (Department of Earth Science & Engineering) – Extending OpenFOAM Computational Fluid Dynamics capabilities with an emphasis on chemical engineering
- Elsa Angelini and Jazz Mack Smith (Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction) – Software Engineering activities for the faculty of Medicine in the ITMAT Data Science Group
- Mark Woodbridge (Research Computing Service) – RSE in the Research Computing Service: 2019 in review (accompanying blog post, RSE team homepage and new case studies)
After the talks, there was a roundtable discussion chaired by Diego Alonso, with a panel including Elsa Angelini, Jeremy Cohen, Phoebe Pearce and Mark Woodbridge, to help answer some questions about what the audience would like to see from the Community next year, how we can communicate with each other better and who can get involved to make those things happen. There were many excellent contributions from the audience, who were also very engaged and eager to see the community grow and take an active role on it.
Among the activities that were discussed – and that gained volunteers to help make them a reality – were the creation of a Slack workspace as an instantaneous, bidirectional communication channel within the community (already up and running; sign-up now!) and the recruitment of RSE Champions in the different communities (PhD students, postdocs, etc) to promote Community events and bring more people aboard or to assist with the organisation of departmental events.
The event concluded with informal drinks and nibbles in the ICT Kitchen – including mulled wine! – where the enthusiastic attendees and speakers mingled together and shared experiences and plans for the future.
There are plenty of things going on and 2020 is due to see a very bright RS Community at Imperial!