Five researchers from FAIRsharing and the larger Data Readiness Group here at Oxford attended RSECon22 last week, presenting a poster and several talks during the conference.
The talks will be available in due course from the RSE Society YouTube channel, but in the meantime there’s a lot of great news about the topics covered and the people attending on the conference hashtag, #RSECon22.
Each of us attending RSECon22 had our own impressions of the event, so please enjoy our summaries of the presentations we attended and the people we met.
This was my first RSE conference. I had great time in the conference. So much to learn in area of software research development. It was a good opportunity to meet people from different areas of software engineering and exchange views. It was great learning experience both socially and technically. The venue for the event and after parties were easily accessible in the wonderful city of Newcastle. I am motivated to enroll to the community and hoping to host a session next year.
Prakhyat Gailani
Meeting again in person with the RSE community has been a great experience. I enjoyed both the conference talks and social events. I especially found interesting how RSE experiences and common challenges and difficulties were shared. For example, “coding confessions” was a great session in which seven software developers confessed a big error they have made when developing research code. The talk that Prof Neil Ferguson (University College London) gave about how the epidemiologists and RSE worked together in a record time to develop tools to analyse Covid data was brilliant. I also like examples of interdisciplinary applications that use Machine Learning, e.g. an inspiring writing tool for kids trained with thousand of tales, and a healthcare platform to monitor people with dementia using house sensors. The three conference dinners were in great venues (a brewery, a street food market close to the river and a luxurious banquet salon) and help to create a relaxing atmosphere to socialise with other colleagues.
Ramon Granell
Having attending this conference since it started it’s heartening to see how the community has increased in size; the event was surprisingly crowded and noisy at times, packing the main lecture theatre and the social events. Perhaps these large numbers will hasten a better understanding within university departments of the important role of the RSE, an understanding which has developed quite slowly. The benefit of such events is not necessarily learning new skills, but finding out what new things there are to learn. This one was no exception, with some interesting discussions on licensing, citations and funding (particularly by means of Community Interest Companies) to be had. Looking forward to the next one!
Milo Thurston
After three years of isolation and online events it was great to feel truly part of the RSE community once more in Newcastle. The programme from the conference was carefully chosen: my own talk on RSE identities was followed by Dr. Melanie Langer of the STRIDE project (https://stride.org.uk) presenting work that came to a different conclusion through a different methodology: it will be fun to explore that dichotomy!
Graham Lee
This was my first trip to the RSE Society Conference, and I hope to attend future events. Learning about how the RSE communities are built and managed was exciting, as the number of community members has grown to 600 during this conference. The best part of the conference for me was the opportunities for networking and discussions. I had a number of interesting conversations that will hopefully grow into collaborations over the coming months. The community was welcoming, the talks were excellent, and Newcastle itself made for a fantastic venue.
Allyson Lister
Thank you to TyneSightPhoto for all of the photos here other than the group photo by the poster, which was taken by Milo Thurston.
