November 2023 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter November 2023

Welcome to the November 2023 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News, Web & Blogs

Web

• A call for applications for access to ARCHER2 and certain Tier 2 HPC systems is now open.
• Edinburgh University will be hosting the UK’s first exascale supercomputer.
• Guiding principles for conducting code reviews.
• Participate in the 2024 State of Open Soruce survey.
• The Society of Research Software Engineering have published their latest newsletter.
• rOpenSci, who promote open and reproducible research have published their latest newsletter.
• The University of Sheffield is hosting a series of bitesize seminars on how best to share different types of research data.

MATLAB

• MATLAB R2023b includes updated support for gate-based quantum computing

Open Research

• Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) published a short explainer video on free software.
• A series of factsheets from FAIRsharing have been published.
  • FAIRsharing in a nutshell
  • FAIRsharing for you: funders
  • FAIRsharing content: databases overview
  • FAIRsharing for you: researchers
  • FAIRsharing for you: journal publishers

Blogs

• Eric Jensen and Daniel Katz write on What we learned about research software careers from a recent international workshop.
• Julia Evans presents a talk titled Making Hard Things Easy, exploring how we can better tackle learning difficult to grasp technologies.

Publications

Events

• The N8 CIR are hosting a half-day event on the 8th November 2023 to discuss the challenges of data access in the field of digital health and what organisations and researchers are doing to overcome this challenge.
• NVIDIA are hosting a free AI and Data Science Virtual Summit on the 8th November 2023.
• The N8 CIR are hosting an event on Synthetic Data Generation on the 28th November 2023.
• The PyLadies Conference will be running from 30th November to 3rd December 2023.
• The Alan Turing Institute is hosting the UK’s national showcase of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) (19th - 24th March 2024), AI UK 2024. Tickets are now available.
• The University of Sheffield will be hosting its Annual Open Research Lecture on the 6th December 2023.
• You can now apply for the Open Science Retreat (25th - 29th March 2024). This event brings people together to share their experiences of and best practices for open science.
• The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) have announced their next collaborations workshop, to be held 30th April - 2nd May 2024. You can now register your interest

Training

R

• R for Statistics and Data Visualisation 2023-11-09 (fully booked, 5 people on waiting list)

Python

• Python for Data Science I 2023-21-05 (fully booked, 5 people on waiting list)
• Python Programming 1 2023-11-27 (39 places available) 2023-12-11 (fully booked, 2 people on waiting list).
• Python Programming 2 2023-12-01 (65 places available) 2023-12-12 (3 places available).
• Python Programming 3 2023-12-04 (65 places available) 2024-01-16 (2 places available).
• Supervised Machine Learning 1 2023-11-17 (14 places available) 2023-11-30 (91 spaces available) 2023-12-14 (7 spaces available) 2024-01-12 (13 spaces available) 2024-02-02 (13 spaces available)
• Supervised Machine Learning 2 2024-01-15 (fully booked, 2 people on waiting list) 2024-01-29 (10 spaces available)
• Temporal Analysis in Python 2023-11-24 (4 places available) 2024-01-19 (6 spaces available)

Matlab

• Introduction to Matlab 1 2023-11-09 (1 place available)
• Introduction to Matlab 2 2023-11-30 (9 places available)

External Training

• The Turing Online Learning Platform contains a number of courses, many of which can be undertaken independently.
• 4th OpenAIRE Open Science Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp
• Durham University are hosting a workshop series on debugging, testing and correctness for massively parallel codes

Opportunities

Jobs

You can always check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles over at the RSE society’s vacancies board.

• Grade 9 Principal Research Infrastructure Developer at UCL. Applications close 23rd November.
• The University of Sheffield are offering a PhD in the School of Biosciences, with the aim of developing a web-based software platform for peptidoglycomics, a new discipline to explore antimicrobial resistance and bacterial population dynamics.

Volunteer Positions

• The US RSECon is looking for volunteers for its organising committee.

Funding

• The University of Sheffield’s Unleash your Data and Software competition has launched! PGRs and staff can apply for an award of up to £5,000 for a project. The deadline is 1st December, with two drop-in sessions for people to talk through their potential applications on 15th November, and 21st November
• The Open Bioinformatics Foundation have opened a call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship which aims to increase diversity in attendance of events promoting open-source bionformatics or open science. The deadline is the 1st December.

Digital Research Practice Support Community

The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field.

You can join the google group here to stay informed.

The next meeting is scheduled for 2pm on Wednesday 8th November.

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

• Making research software more visible and reusable: Open Source Software and FAIR4RS (6th December 12:00 - 13:00) in conjunction with Open Research Conversations we look at the FAIR principles and how they apply to research software under the FAIR for Research Softrware (FAIR4RS) principles.

LunchBytes needs YOU

LunchBytes are organised by and for the research software community at The University of Sheffield. If you’d like to curate a session on a topic or present something, get in touch by emailing lunchbytes-organisers-group@sheffield.ac.uk - Or suggest topics on the jamboard.

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software.

They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

The Sheffield RSE Team provides free Code Clinics (in collaboration with IT Services), plus paid services that allow us to collaborate longer term.

Research IT

Research IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff.

Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.