Posted by n.chuehong on 28 January 2016 - 2:28pm 

By Shoaib Sufi, Community Lead.

For some November and December is a time to wind down and slow down to meet the holiday seasons at a gentle pace … but not at the Institute! The community team with the help of the wider Institute, fellows and friends was busy putting together and finalising the building blocks that would enable a most productive 2016 for research software advocacy!

Read on to find out more more about Fellows 2016 and Collaborations Workshop 2016 (CW16) to see who we are supporting research software related activities in … you guessed it!... 2016! (and beyond).

In addition there are two reports from our Fellows around the rise of Python in HPC and software training.

Fellows

Previously we got ahead of ourselves and reported on the amazing face-to-face selection day that took place for Fellows 2016, if you missed that during the last update you can read about what happened.

In December we announced our Fellows for 2016. We have 17 new Fellows working from a variety of different areas of research and career stages. You will be hearing more from them no doubt in 2016 via the blog and news items about their activities. If you would like to meet them and perhaps even build a collaboration with them, then most of them will be at the Collaborations Workshop 2016 (CW16)

Collaborations Workshop 2016 (CW16)

The Collaborations Workshop is the Institute’s premier annual event, attracting most of the institute staff, previous and new fellows, research software engineers, researchers, developers, publishers, funders, trainers, project leaders and more.

This year it’s at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, UK) so that’s one more reason to attend!

The main theme of CW16 is Software and Credit and reading about our initial Software and Credit workshop, will be very useful background. The other themes will include reproducible research, collaborative working, data science and code / data sharing. It’s the must attend event of CW16 if you want to find out or get an update about the topics being covered and build collaborations!

If you're in the mood for building something neat, useful or game changing then the CW16 Hackday (which takes place after the main CW16 workshop) will give you an idea venue; who knows you may even meet members of your future ‘dream team’ there.

Silicon snake oil - for real!

Institute Fellow, Oliver Laslett, attended Super Computing 2015 in Denver, Colorado. He will be writing a few articles about his experiences and views from the event. In his first article he writes about the rise of Python on HPC - the machine room suddenly became more dangerous (just kidding!).

Drishti Training

Institute Fellow, Farah Ahmed, talks about training staff and post grads in the open source Volume Exploration and Presentation Tool Drishti, at the prestigious Computed Tomography laboratories at the University of Texas. Post-workshop support being identified as key to help trainees build upon and use what they have learnt.

Final words

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the updates this month please feel free to get in touch  via email.