October 2024 Newsletter

10 October 2024 13:00

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter October 2024

Welcome to the October 2024 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News

Events

Upcoming Local Events

  • Fridays during October - SheffieldR User Group is hosting hybrid weekly hackathons for those participating in HacktoberFest 2024.
  • Weds 16th Oct - CMI Town Hall Eighth CMI community and networking event.
  • Open Access Week: Oct 21st-25th is International Open Access Week, and the university library is hosting a programme of events to explore the value and possibilities of open access scholarship.
    • Tues Oct 22nd 1-1.30pm - White Rose University Press - A bitesize introduction. Book your place here
  • Open Research Conversation’s Autumn-Winter Schedule has now been announced with 5 Wednesday lunchtime events from October through February.
    • Weds Oct 23rd 12-1pm - Beyond open access: Democratising knowledge through accessible research outputs. Book your place here.

Upcoming External Events

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Articles & Blogs

Papers

Podcasts

Training

At Sheffield

FAIR2

The FAIR2 for Research Software Training Programme has been developed by the RSE, Data Analytics Service and Library teams and will be launched in October. An introduction to the programme will be given in a LunchBytes session 2024-10-22. The full syllabus is now live on MyDevelopment (requires login).

Sheffield Bioinformatics Core

The Sheffield Bioinformatics Core is pleased to announce a schedule of courses for the new academic year. These courses provide an introduction to the R programming language, Unix environment (required for the use of the University’s High Performance Computing facilities) and also specific applications in RNA-sequencing. You can now sign-up for these courses using myDevelopment (search for “bioinformatics”). Course charges still apply, and upon sign-up we will contact you for a valid grant code or cost centre. In-person attendance is encouraged, but online options are also available.

  • Oct 28th, 30th, Nov 1st 1-4pm - Data Manipulation and Visualization (£72 for students and £80 for staff)
  • Tues Nov 12th 1-4pm - Introduction to RNA-seq analysis (£32 for students and £40 for staff)
  • Weds Nov 27th 1-4pm - Introduction to the Command-Line for Bioinformatics (£32 for students and £80 for staff)
  • Dec 1st, 3rd, 5th 1-4pm - Introduction to RNA-seq analysis in R (£72 for students and £80 for staff)

Where multiple dates are listed, you will need to attend all dates. You can also find more information on these course on their website (https://sbc.shef.ac.uk)

Outside Sheffield

Funding Opportunities

  • FAIR-IMPACT’s 3rd call, deadline 4th Dec, hopes to fund applicants in four areas
    • Managing data types, schemas and vocabularies and crosswalks for FAIR researcher related metadata (in partnership with FAIRCORE4EOSC)
    • Creating EOSC compliant interoperability policies based on the EOSC Interoperability Framework (IF)
    • Testing the trustworthy and FAIR-enabling repositories prototype
    • Implementation of a shared API for semantic catalogues

Jobs

Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board.

Community

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 6th November 2024.

LunchBytes

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

Due to capacity within the RSE team, there was very limited LunchBytes content over the past academic year. This should be changing soon, a new coordinator for LunchBytes has been found (Research IT’s Farhad Allian), with a plan to reboot these lunchtime seminars in the spring semester.

More information will be coming out over the coming months, so keep your eyes peeled if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or share what you know!

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.

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.

Contact Us

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

Information and access to JADE II and Bede.

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.