This page brings together talks about the activities of the Research Software Development Group, in UCL Research IT Services. This is an affiliate group of the ucl Research Programming Hub.

Abstracts

The Craftsperson and the Scholar

The production and maintainance of software is an important part of research in many fields. Yet code is often lost at the end of projects, and unusable by anyone other than the researcher who created it. This presentation will discuss the relationship of software engineering best practice to the construction and maintenance of research code. The talk will provide some practical tips on coding for research, and give examples of how the UCL team collaborates with researchers to produce readable, reliable, and efficient scientific software.

The talk also at looks at how the Research Software Engineers who look after scientific software might be given a more rewarding niche in the academic system. UCL’s Research Software Development Group, has grown through grant income since 2012 to a team of 6, and helped create effective research software in fields from ancient Babylonian archeology to radio astronomy and from modelling the future of UK housing stock to brain blood flow modelling.

Dr James Hetherington has been working as a research programmer programmer, both academic and industrial, for fifteen years in diverse fields including physics (at Cambridge and CERN), physiology (UCL Centre for Mathematics and Physics in the Life Sciences and Centre for Computational Science), engineering (The MathWorks, makers of MATLAB) and environmental sciences (AMEE, an environmental impact modelling startup). As founder of UCL's Research Software Development Group, chair of the UK Community of Research Software Engineers and a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, he is helping sustain the future of the research software base.

Zacros eCSE

This talk covers a project under the ARCHER eCSE programme carried out by the group, led by Jens H Nielsen.