Posted by d.barclay on 2 February 2023 - 10:00am 

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona

Welcome to this month's SSI Fellows Newsletter which shares activities and opportunities taking place within the SSI Fellows' community. Read on for:

• Fellows' Spotlights: Meag Doherty and Daniele Procida
• January 2023 Community Call recap
• Actions for Fellows
• Fellows' and related activities
• Upcoming events and calls

Fellows’ Spotlight

Meag Doherty, Deputy Chief User Experience Officer, All of Us Research Program

• Updates from call - The first year of my fellowship was a joy. I visited the UK in September, met with fellow Research Software Designers, attended RSECon, and delivered three presentations on the importance of usability in scientific research software. Along the way, I have learned much about what RSEs need to make better software, which you can read on the SSI blog. And thanks to my fellowship work, I connected with the team at  Superbloom who is working on a project to understand how and why scientific OSS projects do or do not consider usability and design. I’ll be volunteering with them over the next few months. I’ll also be attending in-person the Open Science Retreat and Collaborations Workshop 2023, supported by SSI.
• My non-work highlight - After 2+ years of research, I finally finished a family history project based on my maternal grandfather and his siblings coming to America from Italy. I loved taking the time and space to create something from scratch without knowing what it would become. In the process, I also got the hang of Obsidian.md.
• My recommendations - Even if you don't love mockumentary sitcoms, try Abbott Elementary on Netflix. Quinta Brunson knows how to make great television.

Daniele Procida, Director of Engineering, Canonical

• Updates from call - At the recent Fellows’ Community Call I was able to give some updates on work in the last year, most significantly a series of software documentation workshops I held for researchers. Documentation is key to the re-use and enduring use of software used in research, and to the reproducibility and value of the research itself. It’s clear that: there are gaps, in skills, understanding and confidence, amongst researchers; these can be readily addressed in useful ways that make an immediate positive difference; the Diátaxis framework and associated documentation practices are an effective part of that. I was also able to get a better understanding of researchers’ needs from the sessions. I want to do more of these workshops, but it’s also clear that working in-person has far more value than online sessions can provide. I’ll be doing a series of workshops at Humboldt University, Berlin, and I invite other institutions or projects to get in touch. Could I do something of value for you, or your institution, project, research group or initiative? Let me know!
• My non-work highlight - It’s not exactly my accomplishment, but this was definitely a highlight and I was partly responsible for producing the person who did it - if that counts.
• My recommendations - For a book, I am in the middle of “Metaphysical Animals” by Clare Mac Cumhail and Rachel Wiseman and thoroughly enjoying it; it’s about Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgely, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, and how they brought new life into philosophy during and after WWII.

Community Call Recap

During the January 2023 SSI Fellows Community Call, we heard Fellows’ updates from Meag Doherty and Daniele Procida. In discussion groups, we talked about targeted technical skills development for RSEs and pathways to achieve that, new generation generative Artificial Intelligence, and answered Fellowship questions from members of the 2023 cohort! 

Fellows’ and related activities

• Code for Thought - Code for Thought is a podcast on software, engineering, research and anything in between launched by SSI Fellow Peter Schmidt. Recent episodes include a conversation with SSI Fellow Sarah Gibson about Continuous Integration and Deployment. 
   
• Sustain Open Source Design Podcast Episode on AutSPACEs - SSI Fellows Bastian Greshake Tzovaras & Georgia Aitkenhead talk about inclusive co-design of an open source web platform to do citizen science with and for autistic people in this podcast episode.
   
• Real-World machine learning Workshop - In early December, SSI fellows Jesper Dramsch, Valerio Maggio, Mike Walmsley and Gemma Turon delivered a workshop around reproducibility of machine learning in science. The workshop was accepted as part of the Pydata Global conference and participation was remote. We invited additional speakers on special topics and the workshop was extremely well-attended with ~70 people throughout the entire workshop for 2 hours. More information, recordings and transcripts can be viewed here: https://realworld-ml.xyz/ 
   
• Increase citations, ease review & collaboration: Making machine learning in research reproducible - Scientific conferences have seen an immense uptake in machine learning contribution across all fields. This tutorial with open, reproducible Jupyter notebooks by SSI Fellow Jesper Dramsch has a collection of "easy wins'' to elevate any publication in different aspects from model evaluation to interpretability and ablation studies. Up to date materials are also shared on GitHub.

Upcoming events and calls

• Collaborations Workshop 2023 (CW23) - The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop series brings together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, policy makers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. The theme of CW23 is Sustainable Career Development for those in the research software community: looking after your software, your career, and yourself. The call for proposals for mini-workshops, demo sessions, and lightning talks are open, and the deadline for submissions is 24 February.
  • Date: 2 to 4 May 2023
  • Link: https://www.software.ac.uk/cw23

• Vacancy: Research Software Engineer for Digital Behavioral Data - GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany is hiring a full time Research Software Engineer for Digital Behavioral Data. View the job advertisement here.
   
• Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting 2023 (FOSDEM’23) - FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. SSI Fellows Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal and Rachael Ainsworth will be giving lightning talks within the Open Research Tools & Technologies devroom.
  • Date: 4 to 5 February 2023
  • Location: Brussels, Belgium and online
  • Link: https://fosdem.org/2023/ 
     
• Abstracts open for Bioinformatics Open Source Conference - The 2023 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference will take place both in-person in Lyon, France and online on July 23-24. The conference is broadly about open science practices and open source software development in the realm of biology and bioinformatics. Abstract submission is now open until April 20 for posters and talks.
  • Date: 23-24 July 2023
  • Location: Lyon, France
  • Link: https://www.open-bio.org/events/bosc-2023/submit/ 

The monthly SSI Fellows Newsletter aims to share activities and opportunities taking place within the SSI Fellows' community. The newsletter will share a summary of the latest community call, as well as contributions and calls for collaboration from the SSI Fellows. We are looking for newsletter items related to events, webinars, workshops, resources, job and funding opportunities that SSI Fellows are involved in or looking for support with (submit via this Google Form). If you have any questions, please contact Community Manager Rachael Ainsworth at r.ainsworth@software.ac.uk