March roundup – where has the eScience Center been this month?
The eScience Center has been actively engaging with the scientific community through various events and conferences, showcasing the impact we make through the application of research software. Check out what we’ve been up to this month!
Newspapers in the era of AI
On 21 March, KB Lab in Den Haag held a conference in collaboration with the research project Semantics of Sustainability. RSEs at the eScience Center, Carsten Schnober and José Angel Daza have played a large part in developing advanced machine learning applications for the analysis of historical data in this project.
The Historical newspapers in the AI era conference consisted of discussions on the possibilities and limits of Machine Learning and (generative) artificial intelligence applied to large digital heritage collections such as the historical newspapers in Delpher.
SPRINGS project consortium meeting in Ghana
The SPRINGS project held its second annual consortium meeting in Akuse, Ghana, hosted by the University of Ghana. The week included workshops with local stakeholders, strengthening collaboration, raising awareness and advancing strategies to enhance early warning systems and climate-resilient water safety.
As key experts for the project, RSEs Eva Viviani and Jesús García González attended this conference in Ghana under the MINE-DD project, an eScience Center–funded grant awarded to Vanessa Harris (PI, AIGHD) with co-applicants Josh Colston (University of Virginia) and Debraj Roy (University of Amsterdam), who are key SPRINGS partners. Thanks to MINE-DD, they were able to connect with consortium members and present their work so far—including insights into employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for automating systematic reviews (a work done in partnership with eScience Center RSE Laura Ootes) and the visualization of spatial data mapping that identifies transmission risk of key pathogens in low and middle-income countries.
It was a productive week of discussions, knowledge-sharing, and engagement—laying the groundwork for stronger climate resilience in water and health.
NWO conference on earth and environmental science
Yifat Dzigan and Niels Drost represented the eScience Center at the NWO NAC, the annual conference that brings together the research fields within the Earth and Environmental Sciences from the remit of the NWO Domain Science. NWO NAC provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussion and dissemination.
Professionalizing the role of the RSE in NL
The National Coordination Point for Research Data Managment (LCRDM) published the report Professionalizing the role of Research Software Engineers in the Netherlands. Main authors are eScience Center community manager Lieke de Boer and Pamele Wochner from Delft University of Technology. Many representatives from Dutch organizations collaborated on this report, including Open Science NL, Utrecht University, NL-RSE, Delft University of Technology, Wageningen University and Research and the Netherlands eScience Center. The report examines how organizations can support and retain Research Software Engineers (RSEs) – the technical experts who develop and maintain the specialized software that powers modern scientific discovery. The report can be found here.
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.