Call for Submissions – RSLondonSouthEast 2022

The 3rd RSLondon regional research software community workshop, RSLondonSouthEast2022 will take place on Monday 4th July 2022 at Imperial College London’s South Kensington Campus. Run by the Research Software London (RSLondon) 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 (15 minute talk, plus 5 minutes for questions)
  • lightning talks (5 minutes)
  • posters (including a 2-minute poster introduction lightning talk)

Important Dates

  • Abstract submission deadline: 23:59 BST (UTC+1) on Thursday 12th May 2022 Wednesday 18th May 2022
  • Notification of acceptance: Monday 6th June 2022

Overview

Research software and computing infrastructure now represent a significant element of research in almost all domains. As data volumes continue to grow rapidly and infrastructure becomes increasingly complex, but also much more capable, the roles of Research Software Engineers and other Research Technology Professionals are more important than ever. We are seeing an increasing focus on the importance of reproducibility of scientific results and on the sustainability of the software, tools and infrastructure that produce these results. RSEs have a vital role to play in this ecosystem and sharing knowledge, ideas and experiences through workshops such as RSLondonSouthEast provides a great opportunity to develop your skills, build new collaborations and share your expertise.

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.

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
  • Use and development of best practices in research software engineering, including testing, CI/CD, code review, etc.
  • Research software during the pandemic – challenges, opportunities and experiences
  • High Performance Computing (HPC)-related software engineering
  • Experiences from building and running research software communities
  • Training and skills development activities
  • Setting up or running research software groups or teams
  • 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 preparation guidance

Abstracts will be reviewed by members of our programme committee. Reviews are undertaken anonymously – details of abstract submitters (including names/affiliation) are not provided to reviewers, they will receive only the abstract text. However, please be aware that abstract text will not be anonymised – it will be provided to reviewers as submitted. You are therefore advised, where possible to avoid including identifying information in your abstract submissions.

We suggest that you ensure that the following information is included in your abstract:

  • A brief description of what you plan to present – the topic, a description of the work/experiences/ideas, etc.
  • Why will the proposed talk be of interest to workshop attendees? What will they learn from your talk/poster?

Abstract submission and review

Abstracts for regular talks (15 minutes, plus 5 minutes for questions) – up to 250 words.

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

Submit an abstract via the abstract submission form.

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

Abstract author, co-author and affiliation details are removed prior to sending abstracts to reviewers – reviewers receive only the submission type, keywords, title and abstract.

We are also keen that RSLondonSouthEast 2022 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 rslondonsoutheast2022@rslondon.ac.uk if you would like to make use of this support.

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.

Note that where we are unable to accept talks due to limited capacity within the workshop schedule, we may offer the opportunity to present the suggested work in an alternative format, e.g. as a lightning talk or poster.