Collaboration Workshop 12, Oxford
During 21st and 22nd March, the Collaboration Workshop 12 was taking place at Queen’s College of Oxford University. The workshop mainly focused on the software development in academic projects and attracted more than fifteen researchers and developers. Thirty two topics were raised and discussed during the two day event and more than twenty lightning talks were presented.
Among these discussions and topics, I was enjoying the ones that were related to the collaboration between scientific researchers and software developers and a possible new specie for academic research projects - scientific software developer, who acts between the two or plays a dual role in the research.
Who / What is Scientific Software Developer
Alongside the rapid development of computer and computer technology, most of the recently scientific researches will be involved computer software or software development (In the workshop, someone(somewhere) mentioned 40% of research projects were linked to software but I forgot where I found it). We had topic about “Teaching programming to scientist” and “Successful collaboration with computer scientists”, which provided some nice suggestions. There are some natural limitation with above approaches. For example, the strength of a scientist lays on his/her research ability and if he/she starts to cars about programming he/she may lost focus. The computer scientists (it was changed to software developer for clarification during the discussion) usually cares about the quality of the software and cannot aware the research process.
So we need someone who can act the both roles and carry a software project toward success. Someone knows the natural of research and also is familiar with principles of software development.
Currently status of Scientific Software Developer
It is quite common that the researchers do the programming themselves and as we known this usually result in a poor, non-reusable, non-maintainable software.
EPSRC only invested £9 million per annum in software during the past five years. Comparing to the budget of £950M for the year 2012/2013, the software seems definitely ignored.
Similar role does exists but unfortunately there is a lack of identification and the person who does this job has usually not been recognised properly. Such person may be treated as a RA or RF, although he/she does a different job. There are some groups (Scientific Software Development and Management, Computational Science, and Computational Scientists and Engineers) in LinkedIn but we still lack a formal name for this whatever we called new specie.
Gorissen from University of Southampton mentioned they now started to have some posts specialised for scientific software developer. There is one from Imperial University who has similar job. But the we have not heard much of these from other universities. Henji from Microsoft also mentioned Microsoft Research (Cambridge) has “Research Software Development Engineers”, although it is no a academic position.
Where does Scientific Software Developer go?
The main problem with scientific software developer is not a proper name but the lack of career track and path. There isn’t any senior position for such a role. Eventually, you have to follow the route of Research Assistant –> (Research Fellow) –> Lecturer –> Senior Lecturer –> (Reader) –> Professor if you want to develop your career further. But as a scientific software developer you may lack of publications or project grants, which is essential in climbing the ladder in academic (If you decided opting to industry, they may consider you has no practical experience). So basically, you have wasted your time doing this role as it cannot provide your a strong portfolio.
Another problem is in a bid of academic research project, the labour of software developer is usually under-estimated. So there may not exist enough funding for another developer. And from the university point of view, having a pure scientific software developer not subject to any project is a waste and risk in finance, especially in the currently situation of government cutting findings.
What is the future of Scientific Software Developer?
Now, and in the near future, scientific software developer will still be a minority in academia. But things are getting better as Dan Emmerson from EPSRC introduced the Action Plan of “Software as an Infrastructure”. We will expect more funding and job posts in the coming years.
Acknowledgement
First, I would like to thanks all the attends in the workshop and give credit to those who have contributed in the discussion (without them, I cannot write such a topic).
Secondly, I would like to express my special thanks to DevCSI for sponsoring me.
Lastly, Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work and communications.
Disclaimer
This blog does not represent the view of Collaboration Workshop 12. All the opinions are subject to the author.
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