List of sessions
This list currently only has the pre-planned “keynote” sessions invited by the organizers for the SciComp meetup (the second half).
Monday (2 February)
RSE meetup intro
- Contributors: Samantha Wittke, Richard Darst
- Time, Location: 13:00, Palaver
Introductory words.
Sharing GIS Tools Across Disciplines: Hard Choices, opportunities, and Trade-offs
- Contributors: Kamyar Hasanzadeh
- Time, Location: 13:30, Palaver
As GIS methods spread into interdisciplinary research, researchers are increasingly expected to package their workflows as usable software for others. In practice, this is far from straightforward. This talk reflects on several common ways of sharing GIS tools—commercial extensions (e.g. ArcGIS toolboxes), open-source plugins (QGIS), standalone desktop applications, web apps, and simply releasing code—and the challenges that come with each. These include technical maintenance, licensing constraints, usability for non-GIS experts, reproducibility, institutional dependencies, and long-term sustainability. Rather than advocating a single solution, the talk examines both the advantages and the challenges of each approach, using these trade-offs as a starting point for discussion on how researchers and research software engineers can make more realistic and context-aware decisions when sharing GIS methods for interdisciplinary use.
TargetCAT: When a Script Refuses to Stay Small
- Contributors: Ina Pöhner, Rafael Lopes Almeida
- Time, Location: 13:30, Palaver
Imagine a project where a handful of researchers all try to do the same thing - except everyone does it manually, in their own way, and the one automated step crashes regularly due to poor error handling. Out of frustration with this fragile setup, TargetCAT was born. What began as a small collection of personal scripts to manage and process data on potential drug targets refused to stay small. It quietly turned into a research pipeline that enabled several publications and projects, while itself remaining far from ideal in many places.
In this talk, we use TargetCAT as a case study to explore how research software typically evolves in academic projects: how it survives, grows, and gradually accumulates technical debt. We reflect on familiar patterns such as ad‑hoc workflows, "ghost development" carried out outside funded time, and feature creep driven by scientific needs without corresponding resources. Along the way, the story touches on identity challenges faced by researchers whose work is effectively research software engineering, but is assessed through publication‑centred metrics.
The second half of the talk turns to a reboot of TargetCAT as an open‑source pipeline for an academic–industry collaboration. In this part, we share how earlier missteps and constraints, together with a fresh developer perspective and a conscious commitment to RSE practices from the outset, are shaping its second life. We conclude by teasing lessons learned and opening a discussion on how academic projects might better plan, fund, and recognise software work - and how this could support more sustainable, RSE‑centric career paths.
Laptop session
- Contributors: Luca Ferranti
- Time, Location: 16:00, Palaver
Do you have something cool on your laptop you can't wait to share with others? Have ever been frustrated at traditional poster sessions thinking "This would be much cooler if I could demo from my PC". Join our first "Laptop session", everyone with a computer can join and showcase a demo of something they are proud of, doesn't matter if it is a project, your dot files or something else, join to share with others in a chill environment.
Dinner
- Time, Location: 18:00, Other
We have a dinner reservation at Fat Lizard restaurant. Confirm your spot by the afternoon coffee break. You can preview the menu here
Address: Tietotie 1 (~10-15 minute walk away). The menu will suit almost all diets (note it's a more limited menu than the for small groups).
Tuesday (3 February)
Keynote - The RSE community in the United Kingdom
- Contributors: Jeremy Cohen
- Time, Location: 09:30, Palaver
Jeremy Cohen is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Director of Research Software Engineering Strategy at Imperial College London. He has been involved in the Research Software Engineering community since the early days and held a research software development role in a research group prior to the existence of the “RSE" term. He has a PhD in Computing from Imperial and held one of the 5-year Research Software Engineering Fellowships (from 2018) that were funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Jeremy is currently involved in a set of different grants relating to RSE and the wider “digital Research Technical Professionals” (dRTP) space that’s developing in the UK to recognise not just RSEs but also research data and research computing infrastructure professionals. He is the PI of STEP-UP (https://step-up.ac.uk), an EPSRC-funded Strategic Technical Platform with a regional focus on developing skills, community and career pathways for dRTPs.
In his talk, Jeremy will discuss how Research Software Engineering has developed within the UK. He will highlight various challenges and opportunities around developing skills and career pathways for RSEs. He will then look at how the RSE community is expanding to represent a wider group of dRTPs in a range of technical roles who provide vital contributions to support and undertake modern digital research.
Towards FAIR file formats: a case example with Origin & Python
- Contributors: Julia Niskanen
- Time, Location: 10:45, Palaver
Open science and FAIR principles have become increasingly important in the last decade. However, the implementation of Interoperability is sometimes challenged by established software and analytical practices. One example of such established software is Origin (OriginLab Corporation, Northampton, Massachusetts, USA), an analysis software with various features involving graphing, statistical operations, and data processing and transformation. Origin output files are comprehensive and can contain entire analysis pipelines; however, the file format (.opju) is proprietary, the software is restricted to Windows and requires a paid license to access all features, and there is no easy option to export all the contents of the file to other formats. Together, these factors impede the implementation of Interoperability. To overcome these obstacles, I have developed a lightweight Python tool, convert-opju, that can be run within Origin to quickly and systematically export graphs, images, workbooks, matrices and notes to open file formats. While not all objects of the .opju file are currently included, converting the major objects to open formats is a notable improvement to Interoperability. Convert-opju is freely available (MIT License) on Github and Zenodo.
Realization: it's SymPy
- Contributors: Frankie Robertson
- Time, Location: 10:45, Palaver
SymPy looks nice, but it's not a real CAS... is it? In this presentation I hope to show that as well as SymPy scaling down, SymPy is quite a capable CAS for helping to tackle real world problems we might encounter as RSEs. The main content of the presentation is a case study of how SymPy has been a useful tool during my first project as an RSE, working on a simulation of a mass spectrometer, both as a tool for ad-hoc tool enabling DRY and --- using more of its power --- to help design more efficient numerical sampling code. So next time you have some maths to wrangle, I say: "Go on: treat yourself!" (to SymPy)
RSE meetup wrapup
- Contributors: Samantha Wittke, Richard Darst
- Time, Location: 11:45, Palaver
Closing words.
SciComp team meetup intro
- Contributors: Richard Darst, Samantha Wittke
- Time, Location: 13:00, Palaver
Introductory words. Slides.
Cool things and problems
- Contributors: Darst facilitates, everyone may present
- Time, Location: 13:10, Palaver
Our icebreaker of the workshop, and starting point for sharing ideas. Everyone (hopefully grouped into teams from their organization) can present one slide of three cool things they have done lately, and one slide of three problems they are facing lately. We will quickly go through these and use the talk as a starting point for discussion - maybe a few unconference talks can be requested from it.
The session will be built from a shared editable slide deck. Attendees will get contribution instructions (+ more details) closer to the event.
Role of SciComp and RSEs
- Contributors: Heikki Manila
- Time, Location: 13:45, Palaver
What is the role of Research Software Engineers, and teams of them, in universities in the future? Heikki Manilla was president of the Research Council of Finland (then the Academy of Finland) from 2012-2022 and now the director of the "House of AI", an Aalto project helping to connect various disciplines in the use of AI and scientific computing. Heikki will present the funders' side of things and give some vision for how research engineer and scientific computing teams can be made sustainable in the future.
Discussion: The current hardest legal questions in research data and computing
- Contributors: Maria Rehbinder
- Time, Location: 15:45, Palaver
We often hear clear-cut instructions about legal matters in research (copyright, data, ethics, intellectual property, and especially AI these days). Yet humans are behind the scenes, reading and interpreting the legislation, court cases and legal literature and producing these guidelines, and it isn't always so clear-cut. This is a discussion with Maria Rehbinder, Legal Counsel, Aalto University, where we'll peek "behind the curtains" at some of the open questions going around right now, especially related to AI. This will start a two-way discussion about all of these legal matters.
Maria Rehbinder is a Senior Legal Counsel at Aalto University. Her traditional standard projects included copyright, trademarks, and design rights, but more recently has been involved in the initial implementation work of legislation such as the GDPR, AI Act, and Digital Services Act. Maria serves as a member in the Copyright Commission and the Copyright Council of the Ministry of Education and Culture and as a member in the Rights Management Committee of Open Research and Science 2014-2017 initiative of the ministry.
Dinner
- Time, Location: 18:00, Other
We have a dinner reservation at the Itsuyaka restaurant. Confirm your spot by the afternoon coffee break.
It has a buffet with many Asian-type foods. It's at the Ainoa shopping center at the Tapiola metro station, the building above the metro station, third floor. It's one metro stop or a 30 minute walk.
Wednesday (4 February)
Panel discussion: Junior researcher's experience of scientific and HPC and computing
- Time, Location: 10:00, Palaver
Panel discussions are usually full of the most senior people the organizers can find. In this discussion, we'll hear from junior researchers, about how usable they find computing systems and the onboarding process.
Concluding remarks
- Time, Location: 11:45, Palaver
Local team funding discussion
- Time, Location: 13:00, Palaver
We don't know if anyone will be interested in discussing this. If there is no explicit requests, it is safe to assume this won't happen.
How can universities get infrastructure funding for local Research Software Engineer support. How can they work together? This is a discussion, taking into account everything we have learned at the workshop, to make some plans on what comes next. Can we apply as a Finnish Research Infrastructure? Can we form an international NeIC project for this? Any EU opportunities? Is it better to start local? With large computing clusters taking all the hype, what's the role of local people? We will try to figure this out.