December Roundup
SURF Advanced Computing User Day
On 4 December, several eScience Center research software engineers (RSEs) attended the annual SURF Advanced Computing User Day. The event brings together users of the HPC infrastructure available through SURF.
At the event, several colleagues gave talks on various projects and provided demos. Section Head Gijs van den Oord spoke on the WeatherGenerator, and Leon Oostrum, RSE) gave a talk about AGILE, Stijn Heldens and Alessio Scolocco (RSEs), together with project partners, spoke on COMPAS. There was also an eScience booth where RSEs hosted a demo on the PowerSensor.
It was also unveiled that SURF will have a dashboard where those interested can get insight in the energy use of their jobs on Snellius, the Dutch National supercomputer hosted at SURF. In addition, SURF is not only joining the new European supercomputer Alice Recoque, but also planning a successor to Snellius in roughly 2 years!
EOSC National Tripartite Event 2025
On 8 December, our Product Development Lead Jason Maassen and Community Manager Carlos Martinez- Ortiz, participated in the third EOSC National Tripartite Event, in Utrecht. At the event, representatives from the European Commission, EOSC Steerinb Board, and the EOSC Association were in attendance. Together, these Dutch EOSC stakeholders discussed the “Netherlands in the Era of a Mature EOSC” document. This event is just another step in the process of developing a coordinated national vision on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to “provide researchers and innovators in Europe with an open and trusted multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research and innovation”.
Data Days 2025 @ Vilnius University
On 9 December, Training Programme Coordinator Fenne Reimslagh was invited to give an online lecture at the “FAIR and reproducible research software” training event at Vilnius University. She spoke about how good quality research often depends on good quality research software. But what are good software development practices that ensure your software can be reused? In this session, Fenne talked about why researchers should care about managing their research software, how to apply the FAIR principles to software, and how to make software reusable so research becomes more reproducible.
AI4RISE Workshop
On 3 December, colleagues from the eScience Center, RSEs Djura Smits, Cunliang Geng, Fakhereh (Sarah) Alidoost, and Faruk Diblen, and Community Manager Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, attended the AI4RSE workshop at Wageningen University.
The workshop started with a series of presentations, where Carlos presented his “eScience View on AI & RSE” and shared experiences from the eScience Center on using AI in research software engineering. He discussed concrete examples, hared practical tips, and common pitfalls to avoid when integrating AI into research workflows.
The afternoon session was divided in 3 tracks:
Track 1 “AI4RSE: Organization & Management”, focused on researchers’ current level of software maturity and AI integration and what they would like to aim for in the future.
Track 2 “Using AI4RSE Tools”, focused on tools that help RSE evaluate maturity of research software (RSEMM) and analyze the network of repos for a given topic or domain (SecoDash). Track 3, “Vibe Coding” was facilitated by Faruk.
Signed, sealed and delivered on the Barcelona Declaration
We are proud to announce that we have recently signed the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information! As an organisation that continually supports FAIR and Open research, it just made sense. Part of our responsibility in signing this declaration is to support the way research information is being used and produced – “openness of information about the conduct and communication of research must be the new norm”. For more information, check out some of the activities we’ve done so far that support this here.
- FAIR software
- The Turing Way
- Software Management Plans
GenerativeAI and the future of the science system
Technology Officer Elena Ranguelova recently represented the eScience Center at the GenerativeAI and the future of the science system workshop in The Hague. The Rathenau Instituut invited AI experts from across the Netherlands to “pick their brains” on all things related to AI from policy to more practical matters with a final report to be published. Elena “didn’t dare to say that this assumes genAI is the future of AI, perhaps the Agentic/embodied AI will be the (near) future”. What is the future of AI? More work needs to be done but we’re glad, our resident AI expert, Elena, will be a part of it.