RSLondonSouthEast 2020: Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions – RSLondonSouthEast 2020

The 2nd annual London and South East research software community workshop, RSLondonSouthEast2020 will take place on Thursday 6th February 2020 at the Royal Society in Central London. Run by the Research Software London community, the workshop will bring together Research Software Engineers (RSEs), researchers, academics, systems professionals and people from a range of other roles who are interested in research software.

We are inviting the submission of abstracts for:

  • regular talks (20 minutes, including questions)
  • lightning talks (5 minutes)
  • posters (including a 2-minute lightning talk)

Important Dates

  • Abstract submission deadline: 6th December 2019 Deadline extended: Wednesday 11th December 2019
  • Notification of acceptance: 23rd December 2019

Overview

Software is now a key element in supporting and undertaking research across almost all scientific domains. Back in 2014, the Software Sustainability Institute‘s (SSI) survey of a group of randomly selected researchers found that 69% of the respondents could not undertake their work without research software1. As software becomes ever more important within research, this figure is expected to have grown since the survey was undertaken and to continue to do so over the coming years. The Research Software Engineering (RSE) community is helping to enhance the quality, reliability and sustainability of software built within the research domain. As RSE continues to expand, we see many examples of how researchers can benefit from working with RSEs and RSE groups, or receiving training and technical guidance from them.

The RSLondonSouthEast workshop is aimed at anyone who builds, maintains or works with research software, as well as researchers who have experience of working with RSE teams. The RSLondon community focuses on supporting people based at institutions in London and the South East of England and the RSLondonSouthEast workshop is primarily focused on promoting knowledge exchange, networking and collaboration between individuals based at institutions in this region. Nonetheless, we are keen to develop links with and hear experiences from the wider RSE community and are open to participation from individuals at other UK and international institutions.

1“S.J. Hettrick et al, UK Research Software Survey 2014”,​ DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1183562

Topics

We invite the submission of abstracts covering all aspects of Research Software Engineering including, but not limited to:

  • Application of research software engineering skills to novel research challenges
  • Best practices in research software engineering, including testing, CI/CD, code review, etc.
  • Building and running research software communities
  • Training and skills development activities
  • Experiences from collaborations with RSE teams – from either the RSE or researcher perspective
  • Setting up and growing research software groups or teams
  • Approaches for developing research software careers and career opportunities

Publication

Workshop submissions will not be formally published but accepted abstracts will be made available on the website.

We also strongly encourage you to submit your presentation slides to a platform such as Zenodo in order to obtain a DOI for your presentation. We will then link to this from the workshop agenda.

Abstract submission and review

Abstracts for regular talks (20 minutes, including questions) can be up to 250 words.

Abstracts for lightning talks (5 minutes) and posters (including a 2-minute lightning talk) can be up to 150 words.

Abstracts must be submitted via the abstract submission form.

Details of the workshop’s organising and programme committees are available here.

We are committed to promoting and supporting diversity within the RSE field and strongly encourage submissions by individuals from underrepresented groups in this field.

We are also keen that RSLondonSouthEast2020 provides a forum for people who are new to the RSE field and/or not regular attendees of academic-style conferences. As such, we encourage submissions from people who are new to or inexperienced at presenting. There is support/mentoring available if you are new to presenting your work – please contact rslondonsoutheast2020@rslondon.ac.uk.

The workshop aims to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to present their work and ideas. However, the review process will be used to ensure that submissions are within scope, and to manage the selection of presentations and posters where there are more submissions than we can accommodate.

The programme committee will select talks and posters to ensure that there is a good representation of different topics and domains at the workshop. Reviews will be undertaken anonymously – the submitter name(s) will be removed before abstracts are sent to programme committee members for review.