Research Software Sustainability: The Many Facets from Good Software Engineering Practices to Cultural Change in Academia
The sustainability of research software has gained increased attention in academia over the last decade. Multiple national and international projects and initiatives are concerned to improve the sustainability of research software and the incentives and career paths for people in academia who deliver research software. The topic has many facets since research software is often still considered a by-product of research and not a factor in career advancement in academia; typical evaluation criteria include publications and citations, successful proposals and funding, and advised and graduated students. Multiple initiatives and projects are trying to improve this situation, e.g., the Society of Research Software Engineering as well as the Virtual Residency. Funding bodies support research computing sustainability with solicitations and projects, e.g., the UK Software Sustainability Institute, the Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI) and institute conceptualizations such as US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI). Good software engineering practices are one of the concerns to increase sustainability as well as as citations of software, proper training of soft skills and improving career paths for software developers. We have the need of cultural change in academia to incentivize sustainable software development. This talk will go into detail for the facets of research software sustainability and some of the projects addressing the topic.
Speaker bio
Sandra Gesing is an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist at the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, USA. She received her German diploma in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and her PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her research interests include science gateways, computational workflows and distributed and parallel computing. In this context, she especially works on usability, sustainability and reproducibility aspects. She is heavily involved in the US Science Gateway Community Institute, where her role focuses on outreach and community engagement and improving career paths for science gateway creators. The successful European workshop series IWSG (International Workshop on Science Gateways) has been founded by her in 2009 and she has guided since. Prior to the position at Notre Dame, she was a research associate in the Data-Intensive Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in the area of data-intensive workflows and a research associate in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the area of science gateways and grid computing. Additionally, she has perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry. As head of a system programmer group, she has led long-term software projects (e.g., infrastructure on web-based applications).
Contact
Rosa Pinter, 805-893-3914 or rpinter@cbs.ucsb.edu