Fellow Feature: Anne Mickan
Every year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship yeaEvery year, the Netherlands eScience Center shares a call for applications for our Fellowship Programme. The Programme is aimed at members of the academic research community who are passionate about acting as ambassadors for the use of research software. It is for individuals who have the ambition to promote or improve the use of research software within their organization or discipline. Our 2024-2025 fellows are currently halfway through their fellowship year. What better time to showcase their progress over the course of their programme.
We will present you with interviews with each of the Fellows. From creating tutorials to organizing interactive seminars, our Fellows are at the forefront of shaping the landscape of research software practices.
Keep reading to learn more about the progress of the project, ‘T Grand-challenge.org: making AI application benchmarking for medical diagnostics accessible to the public’ led by Anne Mickan, a Research software engineer at RadboudUMC.
What is the goal of your project?
With the surge of artificial intelligence in biomedical imaging, there is an increased need for the open, fair and reproducible benchmarking of AI solutions. Grand-challenge.org is a platform that facilitates this benchmarking process through its challenge feature. It enables researchers to objectively compare the performance of AI solutions on a common, hidden data set. However, setting up a challenge is a complex task and can be overwhelming, especially for first time organizers. To make the challenge feature more accessible, we will organize regular workshops to train organizers in setting up their challenge. Participants will benefit from practical sessions during which they get to experience the challenge feature firsthand. A secondary goal is to create short hands-on tutorials for our documentation. By facilitating regular workshops and by enhancing our documentation, we aim to expedite the challenge launch process and lower the entry barrier for potential challenge organizers; improving overall user experience.
What role does research software play in your daily activities?
A big role. I work as a Research Software Engineer (RSE) on a platform for the development of AI in medical imaging. I spend my days making sure that this software/platform works as intended, improving it with new feature additions and helping users navigate the platform. So, my job is fully centered around research software.
What initially inspired you to apply to the Fellowship Programme at the eScience Center?
In the daily grind of bug fixing and implementing new features, support unfortunately sometimes becomes an afterthought. It needs to be done, but it also needs to be done quickly so that we can get back to the development work. I felt that we could do better in supporting and training our users, and that we can do so proactively, by organizing workshops that introduce our features and that teach users how to use them. Being a fellow makes this plan more concrete and gives me an additional incentive to actually organize these workshops. Help from my mentor and other people at the eScience Centre has also been crucial in designing and advertising the workshop.
How is your Fellowship helping you promote the use of research software in your own community?
We organized the first workshop on one of the central features of our platform in November. It was well received and appreciated by the community. The workshop’s main goal was to help users get started with using the platform, but it also served a marketing purpose since we could use it to highlight the capabilities of our platform.
What have you enjoyed, thus far, during your Fellowship at the eScience Center?
Having a mentor has really helped me put my plans into action. Regular meetings during which we discussed progress and set deadlines were key to moving things forward and to actually getting to host the planned workshop.
What are some challenges that you have faced throughout your project, thus far? How have you overcome these obstacles?
For the first workshop, we had set a participant cap at 50, because that was the max we thought we could handle. We quickly reached that maximum and had to put people on the waiting list. In the end, only 30% showed up to the workshop. That was disappointing. We received feedback later on that some people just forgot because they didn’t get notified through the right channels. We have learned from this experience and will be communicating differently with participants for the next edition of this workshop.
Keeping this project in mind, what do you hope to do after your Fellowship?
I hope that I and the rest of my team keep hosting workshops regularly. It should be a lot less work now that we have done the first one.
What do you hope will change in the use of research software in your community after your Fellowship?
For the specific workshop that we organized, I hope that it helps users time their research (specifically AI competitions) set-up better and get the set-up done in less time and with less frustrating and time-consuming back-and-forth communication with us.
What would you say to people who are interested in applying for future Fellowship Programmes?
Go for it! If you want to take your research software to the next level, promote it, or help people use it, this Fellowship will help you achieve that.
Keep following Anne’s project here: https://www.linkedin.com/company/grand-challenge
Who are we?
The eScience Center is a research organization dedicated to applying research software to answer research questions in any scientific domain through project collaborations. It has the largest concentration of dedicated, high-level research software expertise in the Netherlands. The eScience Center also has a fellowship programme and makes all of its software and training materials openly available online. For more information about what we offer, visit esciencecenter.nl.