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Events from the RSDN, University of Oxford

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The first Research Software Developer Network (RSDN) meeting for the 24/25 academic year will be held next week on Wednesday 2nd October at 12:00 - 13:30, and will be hosted by Oxford Research Software Engineering (OxRSE) in the Doctoral Training Centre on Keble Rd. As usual, we’ll have about 45 mins of talks and afterwards there will be a networking lunch for in-person participants. Please register via the link below so we have an idea of numbers.

Talks:

  • Jack Leland is a Senior RSE and will talk about the training and project support provided to the Schmidt AI in Science Fellowship by the Oxford RSE team. This talk will detail the training provided, including the organisation of an in-person group project week hackathon, as well as some of the fellows’ research projects being directly supported through RSE time, including, but not limited to, computer vision for recognition of bees and GPU acceleration of an atmospheric model in Julia. 
  • Martin Robinson is Head of Research Software Engineering and will present DiffSol: a rust crate for solving systems of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). As well as standard solver features like adaptive time stepping, dense output, events and sensitivity calculation, it features a custom domain specific language DiffSl, allowing it to be called efficiently from higher-level languages like Python or Javascript.

Registration Form:

https://forms.office.com/e/pAkzRdsyj7

Time: 12:00 – 13:30, 2nd October 2024 (Wed.)

Location: Seminar Room 2a/b (first floor), Doctoral Training Centre, 1-4 Keble Rd, Oxford OX1 3NP

(see https://maps.app.goo.gl/FtkibSDEdYQacL4bA)

Teams link for remote participants.

 

Recent Events

 

Oxford e-research Centre. Research software development in different fields of research.

After an introduction to the OeRC and its work given by David De Roure, John Pybus and Karel Adámek will each introduce some of their own work leading research software development in different fields of research.

John Pybus is Technical Project Lead at OeRC, and has been the technical and software development lead for numerous humanities projects.

Karel Adámek is departmental lecturer at OeRC and is leader of the Oxford Square Kilometre Array (SKA) SAFe team, which writes the software for imaging the radio astronomy data for SKA.

Dynamic modelling software to estimate electrification methods in the built environment; analysing effects of climate change and weather extremes to transport networks

Amr Suliman, Researcher in Building Energy Demand & Use

Energy demand in buildings accounts for around 30% of global final energy consumption and a quarter of global energy-related emissions, while on current trends 660 million people will still lack access to electricity and close to 2 billion people will still rely on polluting fuels and technologies for cooking by 2030. We used dynamic modelling software as means to estimate different electrification methods in the built environment in low income countries, to study and simulate future building energy scenarios.

Pamela Opio Acheng, Postgraduate Researcher

Landslides, flooding and changing temperature extremes pose increasing risks to transport networks. To analyse the effects of these perils we bring together remote-sensing (satellite imagery), climate data (from weather stations and model reanalysis) and spatial networks data using various software tools, including Google Earth Engine and the geospatial Python data analysis stack (geopandas, xarray and friends).

Galv; GRAPEVNE

Speaker: Dr. Matt Jaquiery, Research Software Engineer
Abstract: Galv is a data management platform and "metadata secretary" for assisting with battery cycling experiments. The platform has to serve users with widely different levels of technical expertise and enable them to enter metadata for their experiments quickly and accurately. The project has several component parts whose codebases need to be kept compatible with one another, and the codebase needs to be suitable for community maintenance. Matt will invite discussion on meeting these challenges, and about others that may lie in the future."

Speaker: Dr John Brittain, Research Software Engineer
Abstract: GRAPEVNE is a framework for building flexible and extensible epidemiological workflows using module hierarchies. Our aim is to create a dynamic, user-driven ecosystem where the user can easily build, share or reuse modules with flexible deployment options. We seek to address a lack of standardisation in this fast-evolving field - where the adoption of standard method protocols and data formats is far outpaced by the development of new analytic methods and data collection procedures - and promote the rapid development of novel pipelines when new outbreaks emerge.

 

FAIRsharing and Intellectual property and copyright in relation to machine learning and generative AI

The final meeting of 2023 was the Banbury Road building of IT Services with a networking love in Oxford e-Research Centre

Dr. Milo Thurston, Research Software Engineer in the Data Readiness Group of the OeRC and FAIRsharing Technical Coordinator:
"FAIRsharing: an informative and educational resource promoting FAIR data principles."

and

Rowan Wilson, Head of Research Computing, IT Services.
“Intellectual property and copyright in relation to machine learning and generative AI”

Digital Scholarship @Oxford initiative (DiSc)

This month the Oxford Research Software Development Network (RSDN) will meet at the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship (and online) for a session introducing the Digital Scholarship @Oxford initiative (DiSc). The session is scheduled for 12:00 - 13:30 on Wednesday 29 November 2023, and will include a networking lunch for in-person participants.

The speakers will include Professor David De Roure (Academic Director of DiSc), Imran Asif (Senior RSE, specialising in semantic technologies) and Alexander Shiarella (RSE, specialising in visualisation) as well as other members of the DiSc team. Between them, they will introduce their work and outline DiSc’s plans for growing its technical team and project commitments. The combined talks will take around 40 minutes, and will be followed by networking and lunch (provided) in the Blackwell Hall of the Weston Library.

 

An Introduction to ARC and RSS

Andrew Gittings / Rowan Wilson

After a successful first meeting the Oxford Research Software Development Network (RSDN) will meet again to provide an inclusive, informal community group at Oxford for anyone interested in software development within academia. The talk will be hosted at IT Services, Banbury Road, with lunch afterwards at the Oxford e-Research Centre, Keble Road

At this meeting Andy Gittings and Rowan Wilson will talk about Oxford’s Research Computing facility ARC, and what solutions are available to manage research data at Oxford. The talk will be 30 mins followed by 1 hr networking + lunch (provided).  

Speakers 

Andy Gittings is currently the ARC Team Leader. Previously he was responsible for managing the software applications installed on the ARC clusters. Before coming to Oxford he worked for Cranfield University as Research Computing Manager, and in previous lives worked as a Software Engineer for over 13 years specialising in data communications. Rowan Wilson is Head of Research Computing and Support Services in IT Services and has worked at Oxford in research-supporting roles for over twenty years.  

12:00 – 13:30, 31st October 2023

Isis Room, IT Services, 7-13 Banbury Road

 

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