URSSI Blog

Software Support for Socio-Environmental Synthesis

Mary Shelley (Director of IT, Univ. of Maryland School of Public Health; formerly Associate Director of Synthesis at SESYNC) • September 24, 2018

What do sociologists, ecologists, economists, engineers, anthropologists, geographers, hydrologists, evolutionary biologists, and environmental scientists all have in common? Software! Science at the intersection of humans and the environment increasingly requires collaborative, interdisciplinary work among researchers with varied computing backgrounds to gather insights from highly diverse data at multiple scales. Reliable software is necessary to achieving this synthesis. At the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), we provide cyberinfrastructure support oriented toward helping researchers choose, apply, and develop software to meet the research needs of the 40+ interdisciplinary projects we support at any given time. We approach this support from multiple angles.

Through demand, not lobbying: the emergence of an RSE career path

Simon Hettrick (Software Sustainability Institute) • September 17, 2018

When I first started thinking about how we could create a career path for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) in academia, I assumed it would involve persuading university managers to implement a new career path. Quite frankly, I wasn’t looking forward to the interminable bureaucracy that such a change would require me to navigate. Fortunately, a completely different solution quickly gained traction in the UK: the rise of RSE Groups.

An RSE Group is a centralized group, based at a university or other research organization, that employs a number of RSEs and then hires them out to researchers across the organization. It’s a win-win for researchers: they gain access to the skills they need and they only pay for RSE staff when they need their skills. An RSE group pools demand for RSE services across an entire organization which allows large groups to form (the largest is currently 20 RSEs), but the real benefit to pooling is that it evens out the peaks and troughs in demand - and this equates to consistent employment. This is a welcome change for a group of people who were previously expected to view breaks in their contracts as just part of their jobs.

Usability, Training, and Software -- Understanding what Investigators in the Life Sciences Need Most

Jason Williams and Lindsay Barone (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) • September 11, 2018

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a biologist in possession of a data must be in want of a computer to analyze it on. Or, perhaps not. In 2016 as part of our efforts to better understand the needs of users and potential users of CyVerse (NSF-funded cyberinfrastructure for life sciences), we conducted a survey of NSF-funded investigators to determine what was important for them when it comes to analyzing large datasets. Surprisingly, foundational resources like high-performance computers and data storage were dead last in investigator’s ranking of unmet needs.

It takes more than a village to raise good research software

David E. Bernholdt, Lois Curfman McInnes, Michael A. Heroux (IDEAS Productivity Project) • September 6, 2018

Software has been both ubiquitous and largely neglected in computational science and engineering (CSE) since before the field became a recognized entity. The interest in CSE software for both practitioners and sponsors has primarily been on the scientific insights and advances it enables rather than on its value as a long-lived tool or product. As a result, the culture of CSE, broadly speaking, has a structure and reward system that focuses on the algorithms and the results, but where good quality research software, as well as the time and effort required to produce it, often tend to be marginalized.