Alongside presentations from sector leaders in computationally intensive research are opportunities to meet and network with research infrastructure engineers, research software engineers and researchers.

One of the main aims of N8 CIR is to build a community of research software engineers, research software engineers and academic researchers to help drive best practice across the partnership. Bringing together academics and professionals from each of these disciplines is an important first step to creating that community. Although this event is called a Research Software Engineers’ Meet Up it offers a number of benefits to Researchers and Research Infrastructure Engineers too. The event will be of interest to all career stages including PhD and MRes.

Researchers
If you use software to analyse data you know just how challenging it can be. The N8 Research Partnership has more than 40 research software engineers, many of them will be at this event so you can talk to new people and discover fresh approaches to preparing and analysing your data. Perhaps your university doesn’t have enough Research Software Engineers to support your work so meeting someone from outside of your institution could be a useful first step to accelerating your work.

Our headline speakers have extensive experience of research across the academic, public and private sectors and will be able to offer advice about how to share and communicate your work to help increase its impact and raise your academic profile.

Research Software Engineers
With a large number of the N8 research software engineers in one place this is a great chance to meet and catch up with colleagues and find out more about the work they’ve been doing. Through the networking sessions you may find the information or advice you need to finish a project or release a jam in one of your current project’s workflow.

Each of the talks and presentations will contain information about some of the latest developments in the sector and should help to spark new ideas.

To register for this event please use the link on the left of the page, or click HERE.

Invited Speakers

James Hetherington
Director of Research Engineering
The Alan Turing Institute

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: perspectives on social credit systems for software scholars

Academia is a reputation economy: careers succeed or fail based on a shared perception of the scale of contributions.

The Alan Turing Institute is a research institute with a mission both to contribute to scholarship, and to deliver real-world economic and social impact, much of which is realised in software.

In this lecture, Dr James Hetherington, will reflect on life as a “middle author scientist”, consider the contributions to research of those who deliver “too much code and not enough papers”, and consider models for alternative academic careers, and tweaks to the academic system of social credit, which incentivise collaboration and balance scholarship and service.

Mike Croucher
Technical Evangelist
Numerical Algorithms Group

Why don’t more people care about HPC?

Several surveys and analyses by organisations such as The Software Sustainability Institute show that software and computation are an increasingly vital part of modern research. In 2017, 2/3 of all research papers indicated a reliance on software. The democratisation of computational research via languages such as Python, R and Julia has led to the most diverse range of potential HPC users we have ever seen. Are our HPC services ready?

Simon Hood
Head of Research Infrastructure and Platforms
The University of Manchester

Paddling in The Cloud at Manchester

The strategy imposed by our CIO at Manchester is "Cloud first!". How can we make that work for our research community? Part of my job is to come up with a five-year plan for CIR and research data storage for Manchester, with this strategy to the fore. Here I report on our first paddles, what I believe makes sense and what does not and my first steps towards that five-year plan.

Please note: This event is only open to delegates who work or study at one of the universities in the N8 Partnership.