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N8 CIR Research Software Engineer Meet Up Resources

An overview of the talks and presentations from the N8 CIR RSE Meet Up in Leeds on 9 July.

The N8 CIR RSE Meet Up took place at The Studio in Leeds on Tuesday 9 July 2019. Over the day we heard from Kirsty Pringle about the goals of the project, Simon Hood about his experiments with moving production services to the cloud at the University of Manchester, and James Hetherington about ensuring the contribution of RSEs is properly recognised and rewarded within academia and Mike Croucher asking the worrying question ‘Why do so few people care about HPC?’


Speaker Videos and Slides

N8 CIR Introduction Kirsty Pringle
View slides from the talk


Paddling in the Cloud Simon Hood
View slidesfrom the talk
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom James Hetherington
View slides from the talk
HPC - Why do so Few People Care? Mike Croucher
View slides from the talk
Air Quality Walks Kirsty Pringle, RSE Theme Lead

In the first of the afternoon sessions, conference attendees helped to test prototype Air Quality Sensors by taking short walks around the conference venue.

Unfortunately there were issues with port naming on the Raspberry Pis so data wasn’t collected from every walk; the data that was collected is shown on the map below. It's worth stating that the level of air pollution varies day-to-day depending on the meteorology, so a single day is just a snapshot and not representative of the long-term picture.

The World Health Organisation estimates that particulate matter concentrations of greater than 10 ug m-3 are potentially harmful to health, so that's anything yellow and orange on the map. Black means it's off the scale, this only seems to occur when a bus or lorry goes past and the monitor picks up the exhaust plume; it can also be caused by someone smoking a cigarette.

Once these sensors are tested they will be rolled out for everyday use, to get a more representative sample. Many thanks for your help with this work.

Air Quality Map
Air Quality Map

Air quality walk information


Lightning Talks

The afternoon featured six lightning talks from RSEs across the N8 Research Partnership. If they used slides these are available on the link below.

The talks served to highlight the incredible mix of skills that exist across N8 CIR and showed areas where closer cooperation and collaboration may be possible.

  • Helen Burns - Predicting and Visualizing Volcanic Emissions in Nicaragua
  • Martin Callaghan - Masters’ Level Apprenticeships – Professional Learning and Development for New RSEs
  • Ian Cottam – RSE Skills Graph
  • Kate Court – 3 Months as a Software Engineer
  • Adrian Harwood – Mobile App Development
  • Annetta Steyn – Coding for Research

The slides for these talks have been combined in to a single PDF, which you can download from the link below.

RSE meet-up: Ligntning talk slides


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