Code for Thought

In this episode we take a trip into the exciting world of insects - mantises to be precise. Prof Jenny Read and her colleague Dr Vivek Nityananda from Newcastle University in the UK have been conducting some exciting research into 3D vision of these iconic animals.I have come across their research through an article in the New York Times and was hooked.3D vision in insects? Yes, dear listeners, you read that right. Mantises have stereoscopic vision as well but not quite like humans. Given the fact that mantises are so much smaller and still capable of 3D vision - is there something we can learn from them with regards to practical applications and robotics?Here some links you might want to check out:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/science/praying-mantis-eating-birds.html the New York Times articlehttp://www.jennyreadresearch.com/research/m3/media/ some cool videos including how we can trace what's going on in a mantis brainhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26740144/  the paper of the researchGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Welcome to Season 3 of Code for Thought!In this episode, I met with 7 of the new EPSRC fellows in the UK. EPSRC stands for Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. The EPSRC fellowship has been pivotal in putting research software engineering (RSE) firmly on the map in universities and research centres. RSE has become a recognised role not only in the UK, but also in an increasing number of countries around the globe.I had the pleasure and privilege to meet with some of the new fellows last autumn. As you will hear from my discussion with Eilis, Heather, Carlin, Tom, Jamie, Peter and Ed - they bring a lot of interesting and different hopes, ideas and aspirations to their fellowship. https://www.ukri.org/councils/epsrc/ Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Mental health in the workplace is often ignored or sidelined. Not to mention that it is difficult to talk about it in the first place.And yet, pressures in our work environment has been rising, not least because of the pandemic. How  we can look out for ourselves and others is a question I'll be discussing with Graham McCartney and Dave Horsfall. Dave and Graham are leading the UK charity Jonathan's Voice, which was born under tragic circumstances. As Graham says in the podcast: if you have difficulties in coping, don't struggle alone. Reach out! Your employer may provide services such as mental health aiders or services provided by your HR department.In addition to that most if not all countries provide helplines and advice on mental health. In the UK e.g. there are the Samaritans https://www.samaritans.org Mind https://www.mind.org.uk Here are a few links you might find usefulhttps://jonathansvoice.org.uk  Jonathan's Voice Charity - speaking out for mental healthhttps://mhfaengland.org Mental Health First Aiders Englandhttps://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thriving-at-work-a-review-of-mental-health-and-employers Thriving at Work: UK government's Stevenson Farmer report from 2017 on Mental Health https://medium.com/newcastle-university-research-software-engineering/mental-health-for-research-software-engineers-in-academia-2a5f0274f16e Dave's article on mental health in Academia in Mediumhttps://www.mentimeter.com MentiMeter a tool to gauge how your audience, team etc are doingGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Reproducibility efforts are community efforts, as this episode's guest Grigori Fursin makes very clear. But you also need the tools. For some time, Grigori worked on the Collective Knowledge (CK) Framework to help researchers and machine learning practitioners get the best out of their solutions. In this episode we talk about the challenges you face when trying to evaluate machine learning applications and taking them to production. And how tools like CK Framework and others can help.https://cknowledge.org - Collective Knowledge (CK) Framework web site https://mlcommons.org/en/ - ML Commons, a non-profit organisation & community for tools around machine learning applications: in particular ML Perf for performance testinghttps://github.com/mlcommons/ck  - CK framework GitHub repositoryGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Four researchers, from various career stages and research areas, took their first steps into coding in R and Python throughout September and October 2021, as part of the Learning to Code mentorship programme. The programme was an initiative brought by the Software Sustainability Institute's (SSI) Research Software Camp: Beyond the Spreadsheet.In this episode, we (Selina Aragon, SSI Communications Lead, and Jacalyn Laird, SSI Communications Officer) spoke to the four researchers who volunteered to take part in the mentorship programme. Emma, Amirah, Yenn and Rebecca talk us through their experience over the last two months, what they learnt, and how having a mentor impacted on their journey. Listen as they share their reasons to join the programme and the tips they have for other beginner coders.As part of the Research Software Camp, we've signposted to resources for people learning to code. It's likely that we'll be running this mentorship programme again, so if you're interested, sign up to receive updates.About Research Software Camps The Software Sustainability Institute runs free online Research Software Camps twice a year over the course of two weeks. Each Camp focusses on introducing and exploring a topic around research software, thus starting discussions among various research communities. Our latest Research Software Camp: Beyond the Spreadsheet took place from 1 to 12 November 2021. Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

This episode is all about music and the role software and technologies such as AI and machine learning play in creative processes. Meet Emily Howard, David De Roure and Chris Melen from the Centre for Practice & Research in Science and Music (PRiSM) at the Royal Northern College of Music. They talk about how they use AI in their creative processes. One of the key tools the team has developed and uses for experimenting and composing music is an open source tool called PRiSM SampleRNN - and you will be able to listen to some of the audio samples. Occasionally, you hear concerns about AI replacing humans - or in this case - composers and performers. But that's not the case as David, Emily and Chris reassure us. Rather, it is a new tool that can enhance and augment our creativity. And furthermore:“If society is going to have AI so pervasively embedded then we really have to understand what it means to be a creative human being in the context of AI”Linkshttps://github.com/rncm-prism/prism-samplernn   PRiSM SampleRNN open Sourcehttps://www.rncm.ac.uk/research/research-centres-rncm/prism/ PRiSM main web sitehttps://www.rncm.ac.uk/whats-on/events/ Events at the Royal Northern College of Music/PRiSMhttps://www.turing.ac.uk/research/interest-groups/ai-arts  The Alan Turing Institute AI & Arts Special Interest GroupGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Sometime in early 2021 there was a bit of excitement on the Research Software Engineering Slack channel. It was all about a blog post called: "Research Software code is likely to remain a tangled mess". The author, Derek Jones, is quite critical of what we are doing with software in research. I accept that not everybody is a fan of Research Software Engineering and I reached out to Derek, who kindly agreed to talk to me for this episode.In our discussion we touch on a number of subjects, from sustainability, best practices to testing.Links:http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2021/02/21/research-software-code-is-likely-to-remain-a-tangled-mess/Derek's book on Evidence Based Software Engineeringhttp://www.knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/Leprechauns of Software Engineering (mentioned in the discussion)https://leanpub.com/leprechaunsGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Graph Theory has been around for a long time. Its use in computing has found a number of applications, most prominently social networks. In this episode I will be talking with Ben Steer and Gabor Szarnyas about their experiences in working with graphs. In particular: how to assess the performance of graphs, their use in science and research, the state of graph query languages and more.Here are a few links you might find useful:- https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.1201/b16132-3  Handbook of Graphs, a nice overview. - https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.06171 The Future is Big Graphs! An overview of graph processing systems - for which Gabor is co-author- https://github.com/GraphBLAS/LAGraph LAGraph is a draft library plus a test harness for collecting algorithms that use the GraphBLAS- https://www.tigergraph.com Tiger Graph database- https://neo4j.com Neo4j a popular graph DB- https://opencypher.org Open Cypher - the open source graph query language- http://ldbcouncil.org Linked DB Benchmark Council - https://graphblas.github.io GraphBLAS- https://szarnyasg.github.io/posts/graph-query-languages/ Gabor's post on graph query languages- https://raphtory.github.io Raphtory, a temporal graph tool developed by Ben and othersGet in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Here is the final SeptembRSE special episode. And this time I'll be talking to Apeksha, James and Natalia from Amazon Web Services (AWS). We touch on a variety of subjects: e.g. how to come to grips with the ever increasing complexity of what cloud services like AWS offer today (hint: start simple & experiment). Natalia talks about her internship with AWS and I like James' soundbite, likening the role of RSEs to the 'Colossus of Rhodes'.  Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Meet Brad Tipp from Microsoft. Brad thinks that research software engineering has a crucial role to close the ever growing skills gap. The gap between demand for more research and research results and the ever increasing technical landscape that helps make it happen. This is not just a question of using cloud services but also a question of changing the mindset in training the next generation of scientists and facilitating roles that keep up with the technological landscape.Get in touchThank you for listening! Merci de votre écoute! Vielen Dank für´s Zuhören! Contact Details/ Coordonnées / Kontakt: Email mailto:peter@code4thought.org UK RSE Slack (ukrse.slack.com): @code4thought or @piddie Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/code4thought.bsky.social LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pweschmidt/ (personal Profile)LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/codeforthought/ (Code for Thought Profile) This podcast is licensed under the Creative Commons Licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/