RSE seminar series

This series is hosted by the LUMI AI Factory (Aalto and CSC), but others are welcome to attend.

Next seminar

2026 October 23: Yet another talk on Ethics, Privacy, and Complaince

In our team, when anything involves ethics or legal stuff in a project (personal data, etc) we have a saying “Ask Enrico”. But it would be useful if all RSEs had an idea of what is expected ethically and legally when doing a project.

This is not the standard PhD lecture on ethics in research that talks about the normal cases. This is the complexities behind the scene, to let an experienced research engineer involved in project planning adapt a project plan to meet these requirements as easily as possible, and to let customers know any residual risk of problems with the related complaince. It should reduce the amount of “Ask Enrico” that happens early in a project, and leave it for only the harder cases. It may be a bit Aalto-specific, but the general ideas should be applicable to any research organization.

Audience: Anyone who is working with sensitive / personal / confidential data.

  • Location: Aalto campus, TU7, Maarintie 8, and online (Garage zoom)

  • Time: 10:00-11:00, arrive as early as 9:30 for networking, stay later for further discussion and lunch

Upcoming

  • 23 October, 2026: Yet another talk on Ethics, Privacy, and Complaince.

  • 20 Nov, 2026: Container tricks and defending against supply chain attacks.

  • 11 December, 2026: Local LLM infrastructure and k8s.

Past Seminars

All material from past seminars is available in the seminar archive.

About

We aim to have general discussion-starter topics that are suitable for a wide, technically skilled audience. We plan for a lot of discussion time both before and after the seminars. We will try to have good moderation to keep the main presentation focused, and then break out into groups for further talking.

Speaker preparation

Thank you for giving a seminar! Here, we’ll give some basic hints.

The audience is practicing research engineers of various sorts (research software engineers, HPC infrastructure people, poweruser researchers, etc.) Most are fairly computational, but there are a wide variety of backgrounds.

You shouldn’t forget to give the background about what your are talking about and why, for people who don’t know details. (As one example, if one is talking about packaging and distributing Python software, take a least a few minutes to discuss why someone would make packages, the benefits to open science, who actually does this, etc.)

(more advice here)

A good strategy is ~30 min of background and demos, which ends up taking ~60 min when the audience asks questions. It’s OK to have only a general idea and let the audience guide the discussion.

We will try to have a moderator to help manage questions and keep the main presentation on track (helping to postpone really in-depth question until the end).

Organization and history

This seminar series is hosted by LUMI AI Factory partners Aalto Scientific Computing and CSC, but others are welcome to join the organization. If you want to join us, the CodeRefinery chat, #hpc > LUMI AI Factory RSE Seminar channel/topic (or #nordic-rse or #finland), are good places to chat with us.