Research Software Development at UCL

Raquel Alegre

Anastasis Georgoulas

Senior Research Software Developers

UCL Research IT Services

Summary

What are Research Software Engineers?

 

Research Software Development Group at UCL

 

Relevant projects

 

 

What's a Research Software Engineer?

Researcher

Software Developer

Research Software Engineer

Research Software Development Group at UCL

  • Part of ISD, soon to be Advanced Research Computing
  • Since 2013, started with 2 people, now ~30
  • RSE backgrounds: varied research fields and industry
  • Work across different fields and technologies
  • More focused groups:
  • AI Studio
  • Medical Imaging RSDG
  • Health Informatics
  • HPC
  • Web development
  • Mobile development

Services we provide

  • Custom software development
    • From scratch or work on existent codebases
    • Work across all UCL schools

Services we provide

  • Training
    • Software Carpentry
    • Courses and modules
    • Tailored training courses for specific audiences
  • Community and events
    • Research Programming Hub
    • Technical Socials

Services we provide

  • General advice and mentoring  
    • Drop-in sessions and ad-hoc advice
    • Proposal writing
    • Infrastructure choices
    • Interview panels
    • Discuss how software can open new directions

Services we provide

  • Data management
    • Help with writing plans
      • Other help available: Library Services, Turing Way
    • Advice on storing data during and beyond project
    • Tracking versions, licensing (FAIR)
    • Efficient retrieval and processing

Some projects we have worked on

Oracc/Nahrein

  • Prof. Eleanor Robson @ UCL History
  • Online cuneiform text catalogue
  • Create user friendly tools as well as improve and maintain existent infrastructure

Fragments of the

Roman Republican Antiquarians

  • Dr. Valentina Arena @ UCL History
  • Website for research data input as well as publication

Analysing large text datasets

  • Motivation: To adapt methods usually applied to big data processing in scientific research to non-numerate research.
  • Data:
    • The London Times Digital Archive (1785 - 2010)
    • 60000 digitised books from the British Library

How does the occurrence of diseases in published literature compare to known epidemics in the 19th century?

History of medicine @ UCL Information Studies

History of images - Digital History student

 

How do results using digital humanities techniques and digital sources compare to those using traditional methods and small, hand-crafted collections?

 

How did changes in image techniques and the size of images map onto the different genres over time?

 

Study on gender bias

 

  • Interest from different disciplines:
    • Popularity of Professors.
    • How news from the Netherlands are talked about in London.
    • Study on immigration.
    • Articles about Whitechapel.
    • Term frequency related to Monopoly streets.
  • Oceanic Exchanges and Living with Machines, large scale projects based their infrastructure on this design

Analysing large text datasets

The Slade School of Fine Art


Dr. Roma Klapaukh @ RSDG


Working on:

  • Projects:
    • Godot - 3D video games
  • Drop-in sessions for students
  • Workshops:
    • SonicPi, P5JS, Arduino...

Contact us!

r.alegre@ucl.ac.uk

a.georgoulas@ucl.ac.uk

 

rc-softdev@ucl.ac.uk

 

@uclrits

 

Research Software Development at UCL for A&H committee

By Raquel Alegre

Research Software Development at UCL for A&H committee

Presentation about UCL RSDG by Raquel Alegre and Anastasis Georgoulas to Arts and Humanities Research and Innovation Committee May 2021

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