World’s first conference for Research Software Engineers hailed phenomenal success

The world’s first conference for Research Software Engineers (RSEs) has been hailed a ‘phenomenal success’ by a Web and Internet Science (WAIS) researcher, who helped to organise the event.

Dr Simon Hettrick, from the WAIS research group in Electronics and Computer Science, was part of a Software Sustainability Institute team that hosted the event focusing exclusively on issues affecting people who write and use software in research.

Simon, a founding member and Deputy Director of the Institute, said: “RSEs are absolutely fundamental to research. They work with researchers to gain an understanding of the problems they face; and then develop, maintain and extend software to provide the answers.

“We wanted to give them the opportunity to share their methods and best practice on a much wider scale than they can at the moment.â€?

More than 200 RSEs from 14 different countries attended the innovative conference at the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester.

Simon added: “Seventy per cent of researchers report that their work has a fundamental reliance on software, so if we want the UK to continue to be a major research leader, then effort and resources must be invested into nurturing our community of RSEs.

“The RSE conference was a phenomenal success. It created a huge number of new collaborations and brought further attention to the fundamental importance of the RSE role in academia. I feel very positive about the future.â€?

Conference delegates learnt about the cutting-edge techniques being used in research and listened to a broad range of speakers including a keynote talk by Matthew Johnson, Leader of the Agile Projects Team, from Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, and Professor Susan Halford, a Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.

The Software Sustainability Institute was set up six years ago by a team of experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, to support the UK’s research software community with cultivating better, more sustainable research software to enable world-class research. The Institute committed itself to promoting RSEs and the vital role they play in global research.

To find out more about the Software Sustainability Institute visit www.software.ac.uk