Code for Thought

How can we make computing environmentally more sustainable. Meet Loïc Lannelongue, who - together with Michael Inouye - created the Green Algorithms project. Amongst other things, it allows us to estimate the carbon footprint of our algorithms and computing jobs.  The project has been awarded the HDR UK Susannah Boddie Award for Impact of the Year in March 2024.  Links: https://www.green-algorithm...

Lecturers without Borders  wants to bring scientists and school students together. It is an exciting project and for this episode I talked to Eugenia Covernton, who's leading the non-profit organisation.  So, if you are a travelling researcher or RSE, or even if you want to do it from the comfort of your home, LeWiBo give you an opportunity to share your work in schools. https://www.lewibo.or...

scikit-learn is a highly successful and popular Python library for data science and machine learning. It is open source and has a large contributor base.  I had the pleasure to meet with some of the scikit-learn team to talk about how they got involved and how it is possible to run an Open Source project of this size and scale.  If you like to get involved, here are a few links to their home page...

In this episode I meet with Dr Emma Karoune and some of her colleagues from The Alan Turing Institute in London https://www.turing.ac.uk/ to talk about who and what skills we need to create and run modern data science teams. Emma is one of the awardees of the Skills and Policy award at the Turing. https://www.turing.ac.uk/skills-policy-awards-20232024 The Skills and Policy Award by The Alan Turing...

This ByteSized RSE episode talks about the Citation File Format (CFF) https://citation-file-format.github.io/ , created in 2017 to promote the inclusion of software in scientific papers. My guest is Jason Maassen from the eScience Center in the Netherlands. For answers to the quiz questions, email: mailto:code4thought@proton.me Background: Early scientific Journals:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Die diesjährige Konferenz des deRSE Vereins in Deutschland fand in Würzburg zwischen dem 5.März und 7.März statt. Es gab, wie auch schon letztes Jahr viele interessante Schwerpunktthemen, wie z. B. Continuous Integration oder Teaching RSE.  In dieser Folge hört Ihr von verschiedenen TeilnehmerInnen der Konferenz: John Arnold RWTH Aachen - 3min06s Jan Küster Universität Bremen - 7min7s Uwe Schmitt...

Yanina Saibene is well known in the R community and from her work e.g. in the Software Carpentries. In this episode we talk about what it takes to localise and translate training programs and indeed software applications and packages.  https://yabellini.netlify.app/about/   a bit about Yanina from her home page https://carpentries.org/ the Carpentries home page https://rladies.org R Ladies https:/...

I had the pleasure of meeting with Janan Arslan in Paris in 2023. Janan has a fascinating career path that involved not only forensics but also various roles in AI in medicine, which is what she now does at the Brain Institute in Paris. https://www.inria.fr/fr/aramis The Aramis Lab in Paris https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/events/3mt/video-archive/2020-grand-final Janan has been a finalist in...

In this session we talk about the importance of user experience and user experience design.  My guest is Meag Doherty, who works for the National Institutes of Health in the USA and is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI).  https://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme/meag-doherty Meag’s Fellow profile at the SSI. Check out the link to her contributions on the same page. http...

In dieser Folge hören wir Beiträge vom Vorstand des Vereins zur Forschungssoftwareentwicklung deRSE e. V.,  Anna-Lena Lamprecht und der RSE Arbeitsgruppe in der Gesellschaft für Informatik und Bernd Flemisch und Martin Hammitzsch über deren Arbeit im NFDI.  Denn, es tut sich so einiges im Bezug auf Forschungssoftware im deutschsprachigen Raum.  Interview mit dem deRSE e. V. Vorstand 1'46&quot...

In this episode I talk to Chris Holdgraf, executive director of  https://2i2c.org about what it takes to manage and run open source organisations.  Open source projects come with unique challenges (and opportunities) and I think Chris brings important insights from his experience at 2i2c. Some links: https://chrisholdgraf.com Chris' home page https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public  '...

People are talking about the "Reproducibility Crisis" in science. Good to see, that there are researchers that do something about it.  Meet Rima-Maria Rahal and Peter Steinbach from the German Reprodicibility Network.  I met Rima and Peter in 2023 to talk about why reproducibility is important, what we as researchers can do to make our work more reproducible and what the network is doing...

If you want to co-host an episode on Code for Thought get in touch. per email on mailto:code4thought@proton.me RSE Slack channels in the UK (@code4thought or @piddie) or the US (@Peter Schmidt) Mastodon https://fosstodon.org/@code4thought   It's great fun, as my co-host Selina tells us in the short interview. Get in touch Thank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhör...

With her online course 'Learning How to Learn' (and companion book 'A Mind for Numbers'), Barbara Oakley, distinguished professor in engineering, reached many of us who - like myself - wanted to improve the way we learn, adopt new technologies or get into complex subject areas.  Many researchers, PhD students, post-docs teach themselves how to program while trying to get their...

Softwareentwicklung, auch im Forschungsbereich ist immer noch eine Männerdomäne. Aber es gibt inzwischen viele Bestrebungen den Zugang zu Stellen und Berufsaussichten für Frauen und andere unterrepräsentierte Gruppen zu öffnen.  In dieser Folge hören wir von zwei Vertreterinnen: Bernadette Fritzsch vom Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven und Ruth Schöbel vom Forschungszentrum in Jülich. https:/...

It's time for a ByteSized RSE episode - and this time on the subject of 'easybuild' a tool to help you build and install software on high performance computers (HPC).  My guest to help me with presenting easybuild is Jörg Saßmannshausen from Imperial College in London, UK. NOTE: this is an entry level discussion.  And there is a QUIZ as well. If you know the answer to the two follow...

My guest in this episode is Veronika Cheplygina, Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  We talk about machine learning and AI in medicine and Veronika brings a badly needed realism to the discussions. In the latter part of our conversation we also focus on the difficult and sometimes frustrating aspects of academic life.  I enjoyed my discussion with Veronika and I hop...

Welcome back to a new season of Code for Thought. The subject of this episode is energy consumption in computing. My guests are Wim Vanderbauwhede (University of Glasgow, UK) and John Wernvik (Eco Datacentre, Sweden). This is a big subject area and there will be more on this later  this season - so watch out. Links: https://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wim/ Wim's page at Uni Glasgow https://www.science...

So, das ist jetzt die letzte Folge der 6. Serie von Code for Thought und diesmal geht es um Open Science. Mein Gesprächspartner ist Konrad Förstner von der TH Köln, den einige von Euch vielleicht vom Open Science Radio her kennen, das er mit Matthias Fromm schon seit längerer Zeit betreibt.  Euch Allen ein paar schöne und hoffentlich erholsame Tage. Ich mache eine kleine Pause und es geht dann im...

In this last (English) episode of Season 6, I'll be talking to Sara Petti and Evgeny Karev from the Open Knowledge Foundation. Sara and Evgeny work on a project called Frictionless Data, which aims to make working with (open) data easier and more seamless.  Like many organisations around open source and open data they invite contributions from engineers. Some links for the Open Knowledge Foun...

I met Ghislain Vaillant for our interview at the Brain Institute at the Pitié Salpetrière Hospital in Paris. Ghislain has an interesting career path that took him from an RSE role in the UK to the private sector and back to academia (in France) again.  Our conversation touches on differences in RSE roles between countries (e.g. UK/France) and how big events shape our careers.  Some links: https://...

In this episode of ByteSized RSE I talk about Django, a Python based web development framework that was developed in the mid 2000s.  My guests are Tom Couch from the University College London and Max Albert from Southampton University. Links: https://www.djangoproject.com the entry point for Django with tutorials and references https://www.dj4e.com Django for you tutorial site https://www.feldroy....

In the second part of the diversity in the RSE community series, I am talking to Mariann Hardey. Mariann is an associate professor at Advanced Research Computing of the University of Durham, UK. She also published a book called 'The Culture of Women in Tech' in 2020. In our conversation we don't only talk about the barriers women and other underrepresented groups in tech still face,...

Was alt und gebraucht ist muss nicht immer schlecht sein. So Markus Harrer von der Firma InnoQ. Markus erklärt uns wie man Legacy Software erhalten kann und warum "Boring Software" eigentlich ganz gut ist. Und wenn man schon erneuern muss, sollte man sich über die Vor- und Nachzüge im Klaren sein. Markus zieht durch die Lande mit Vorträgen und Seminaren. Unten eine kleine Auswahl von Lin...

I met with Nathan Cassereau and Hatim Bourfoune from IDRIS, a national computing centre for the CNRS (the national research centre in France). Nathan and Hatim work on the Bloom project, an open source large language model, which was created using the Jean-Zay supercomputer.  Thanks to Nathan and Hatim I had the chance to take a look at the machine after our interview.  LLMs and AI/ML in general h...