October Roundup – where has the eScience Center been this month?

The eScience Center actively engages with the global scientific community through various events and conferences, from the RDA Plenary in Brisbane to the Open Science Festival in Groningen. Check out what we’ve been up to this month!

RDA 25th Plenary Meeting and more, in Brisbane

Community Manager Carlos Martinez Ortiz was in Brisbane in October for the RDA Plenary, which was co-located with International Data Week (IDW 2025). He was was involved in organising two sessions:

IDW

807 attendees: 704 onsite and 103 online,
from 75 countries across six continents.
107 sessions delivered, featuring 4 plenaries and 130 poster presentations.

Additionally, since he was already in Brisbane, he attended a couple of events which are relevant for our activities:

  • ReSA’s workshop on Supporting research software in research policy and funding programs, held as a co-located event – this was useful for us to see the challenges others face (as we do) regarding funding of research software.
  • ARDC (Australian Research Data Commons) Digital Research Skills Summit: this was very interesting to see the training initiatives supported by ARDC and how they connect to our own.
  • eResearch Australasia Conference, which was a great opportunity to learn from the work and challenges from the Australasia research community.

Atmospheric and Interior Evolution of Planetary Magma Oceans workshop

Senior Software Engineer Hanno Spreeuw attended the Atmospheric and Interior Evolution of Planetary Magma Oceans workshop, conducted by the Lorentz Center and sponsored by the Netherlands eScience Center, running from October 6–10 in Leiden. Tim Lichtenberg from the University of Groningen — lead applicant of our PROTEUS project — was one of the initiators.
It was designed as an intercomparison workshop: the goal was to define a shared protocol for comparing different models that simulate the coupled evolution of planetary interiors and atmospheres. By the end of the week, the participants successfully produced a draft version of a scientific paper describing this protocol: the CHILI project (Coupled atmospHere Interior modeL Intercomparison). The CHILI initiative forms part of the broader CUISINES framework (Climates Using Interactive Suites of Intercomparisons Nested for Exoplanet Studies), which aims to provide the exoplanet community with a structured way to compare and validate their models.

By standardizing these comparisons, CHILI will help scientists interpret future James Webb Space Telescope observations and deepen our understanding of how terrestrial planets form and evolve.

EWED united researchers and firefighters at its Training Event & Hackathon

At the Extreme Wildfire Events Training Event & Hackathon Senior Research Software Engineer Peter Kalverla participated in a workshop for firefighters from all over Europe to teach them how to work with our software as a tool to manage complex extreme wildfire crises in real time.

Read more at EWED united researchers and firefighters at its Training Event & Hackathon | UCP Knowledge Network

Open Science Festival 2025

Fenne Riemslagh, Coordinator of the Training Programme at the eScience Center attended the Open Science Festival at Groningen University on 24 October. The day was opened by Ana Persic, head of the open science programme at Unesco, who praised the progress we are making in the Netherlands but also presented the many worldwide challenges (of which equity is the most pressing) that still need to be addressed. 

She co-hosted a session with Neha Moopen from Utrecht University. Neha presented the Turing Way and Fenne presented the Coding Cafe initiative. They created a chapter in the Turing Way about the coding cafe initiative and let participants contribute to the Coding Cafe chapter of the Turing Way by make issues and pull requests. There were a lot of positive reactions from people who are interested to start a local Coding Cafe!

The day ended with a very strong speech by Chris Hartgerink, founder of ResearchEquals, who inspired us to be bold in our work and challenge practices that are in the way of Open Science. Only if we dare to speak up and take alternative routes, can we move forward and make Open Science the norm.

SURF Accelerated Computing Symposium

On Wednesday 15 October, Section Head Gijs van den Oord attended SURF’s first edition of the Symposium on Accelerated Computing for Application Workflows (SACAW). In a very interesting series of talks academics and research software engineers presented their experience with porting numerical codes to graphical processing units (GPUs): devices which nowadays play a key role in the realms of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. The eScience Center was well-represented by talks from astrophysicist Oliver Porth (UvA) on the AGILE project, and fluid dynamics expert Pedro Costa (TU Delft) on CaNs, software we work on in the ExaFlow project. 

It was a great day with compelling testimonials about collaborations with the eScience Center in technology-driven HPC- and AI-projects! 

Other Events