URSSI Blog
Report from the URSSI Winter School pilot
Karthik Ram, Kyle Niemeyer, and Jeffrey Carver • January 29, 2020
In late December 2019, we ran our first ever URSSI school on research software engineering (https://github.com/si2-urssi/winterschool#tentative-schedule). We began accepting applications in July and received an overwhelming response to our call for applications. For the 30 participant slots available, we received 169 applications, meaning we had a challenging time selecting the participants and had to turn away a large number of interested researchers. Our students came from 22 different universities/research institutes, mostly graduate students (19 students, 8 postdocs, and 1 professional researcher), and from fields such as astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemical engineering and neuroscience. While the selection committee used multiple criteria to evaluate and select participants, successful applicants already had some experience with Python programming, Git, and Unix skills, which was necessary to benefit from the workshop.
FAIR Software at the 2019 eScience Symposium
Ben van Werkhoven (Netherlands eScience Center, NL-RSE), James Meakin (Radboud UMC, NL-RSE), Anna-Lena Lamprecht (Utrecht University), Stephan Druskat (DLR, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), Pablo Rodriguez-Sanchez (Netherlands eScience Center) • December 9, 2019
(reposted from the Netherlands eScience Center blog)
Image by Netherlands eScience Center
FAIR data has been on everybody’s lips for a while. Many think that FAIR software will become “the next big thing” in eScience. Reasons enough to devote a session at the National eScience Symposium to the discussion of FAIR and its meaning for research software.
Software Sustainability in the Molecular Sciences
Theresa L. Windus & T. Daniel Crawford • November 14, 2019
The molecular sciences — including chemistry, materials, biophysics and biochemistry — have a long history of developing software to answer core scientific questions. The field also has a long history of challenges to software sustainability. This blog post discusses some of the software sustainability challenges and the opportunities/possible solutions that the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) is working toward with the molecular sciences software development community.
The MolSSI is an NSF-funded project that is a nexus for science, education, and cooperation for the global computational molecular sciences community. Funded in 2016, the MolSSI seeks to provide software expertise and infrastructure, education and training, and community engagement and leadership in molecular sciences software development. The fundamental purpose of the MolSSI is to serve and enhance the software development efforts of the broad field of computational molecular science.
Bloodsuckers, banshees and brains: a bestiary of scary software projects and how to banish them
Neil Chue Hong & Benjamin Cowan • October 31, 2019
With All Hallows Eve upon us once more, as the souls of the dead come to haunt us, it’s time to recount terrifying tales and scary stories… about software. You might think that research software is safe from such gruesome goings-on but you would be wrong, for there are many undead projects out to devour us.
Here’s how to recognise some of these spooky software, along with other pestilent projects, and dispatch them back whence they came.