4th Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences
(https://wssspe.researchcomputing.org.uk/wssspe4/)

Location: School of Computer Science, Kilburn and IT Buildings, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK (Buildings 39 and 40 on the campus map)

Dates: 2 ½ days from Sept. 12th noon – Sept. 14th 5 pm, 2016

Immediately preceding and co-located in Manchester with First Conference of Research Software Engineers (RSE Conference) (Sept 15-16 at Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK)

Twitter_logo_blue Follow @wssspe, tweet with #wssspe

A nominal registration fee will be charged.

Abstract:

Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of research software at all levels. It is now critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, maintenance, and sustainability of open-use research software: the software upon which specific research results rely.  Open-use software means that the software is widely accessible (whether open source, shareware, or commercial).  Research software means that the choice of software is essential to specific research results; using different software could produce different results.

In addition, it is essential that scientists, researchers, and students are able to learn and adopt a new set of software-related skills and methodologies. Established researchers are already acquiring some of these skills, and in particular, a specialized class of software developers is emerging in academic environments who are an integral and embedded part of successful research teams. WSSSPE provides a forum for discussion of these challenges, including both positions and experiences, and a forum for the community to assemble and act.

WSSSPE4 will consist of two separate tracks with some joint sessions:

Track 1 – Building a sustainable future for open-use research software has the goals of defining a vision of the future of open-use research software, and in the workshop, initiating the activities that are needed to get there.  The idea of this track is to first think about where we want to be 5 to 10 years from now, without being too concerned with where we are today, and then to determine how we can move to this future.

Track 2 – Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software has the goal of improving the quality of today’s research software and the experiences of its developers by sharing practices and experiences.  This track is focused on the current state of scientific software and what we can do to improve it in the short term, starting with where we are today.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Development and Community
    • Best practices for developing sustainable software
    • Models for funding specialist expertise in software collaborations
    • Software tools that aid sustainability
    • Academia/industry interaction
    • Refactoring/improving legacy scientific software
    • Engineering design for sustainable software
    • Metrics for the success of scientific software
    • Adaptation of mainstream software practices for scientific software
  • Professionalization
    • Career paths
    • RSE as a brand
    • RSE outside of the UK or Europe
    • Increase incentives in publishing, funding and promotion for better software
  • Training
    • Training for developing sustainable software
    • Curriculum for software sustainability
  • Credit
    • Making the existing credit and citation ecosystem work better for software
    • Future credit and citation ecosystem
    • Software contributions as a part of tenure review
    • Case studies of receiving credit for software contributions
    • Awards and recognition that encourage sustainable software
  • Software publishing
    • Journals and alternative venues for publishing software
    • Review processes for published software
  • Software discoverability/reuse
    • Proposals and case studies
  • Reproducibility and testing
    • Reproducibility in conferences and journals
    • Best practices for code testing and code review

Important Dates:

  • Submission of lightning talks: July 10
  • Submission of Track 1 idea papers: July 10
  • Submission of Track 2 position papers, experience papers, presentations of previously published works, and demos: July 10
  • Submission of travel support requests: July 10 open through July 15
  • Lightning talk decisions announced: Aug 1
  • Track 1 idea papers decisions announced: Aug 1
  • Track 2 position papers, experience papers, presentations of previously published works, and demo decisions announced: Aug 1
  • Travel support decisions announced: Aug 2
  • Submission of camera-ready papers: Aug 14
  • WSSSPE4: Sept 12-14

Submission types and formats:

  • Lightning talks: a short paper, up to 2 pages, that if accepted can be conveyed in a 5 to 7 minute talk, either on Track 1: Building a sustainable future for open-use research software or Track 2: Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software.  Lightning talks may be based on either novel or previously published work, but must contain a core idea that will contribute to the discussion in the workshop.
  • Idea papers: a longer paper, up to 8 pages, that presents implementable proposals related to Track 1: Building a sustainable future for open-use research software. Track 1 participants will build on the proposals and ideas in these papers, with the goal of initiating the planning, development, and execution of some of the ideas during the workshop itself. Given the magnitude and importance of the task at hand, the WSSSPE4 organizing committee encourages these proposals to be developed on an open, public, and inclusive basis. Submitters are invited to present a vision of some aspect of the future of open-use research software, and a plan of activities to gather and organize the resources needed to get there.
    • Example idea paper topics:
      • Adaptation of industrial software engineering principles into the research software community with a plan to fund the work
      • Funding and scaling software carpentry style training in advanced topics
      • Infrastructure and funding for community maintenance of open use research software
      • Scaling the SSI beyond the UK
      • Specific proposals of how to bridging/network the various research software engineering communities in scalable manner without destroying independence and unique foci of each community
    • Question: These Track 1 idea papers sound a lot like a grant proposal; is a budget required?
      Answer: WSSSPE is not a funding agency; idea papers do not need detailed budgets. Submitters are invited to inspire and explain: what particular need is unmet or undermet and how could we meet it.
    • Question: Open collaborative proposal writing is unusual, why is this being encouraged?
      Answer: There is a huge need for improved practices both at the individual and community levels around open-use research software. The many efforts to address this have had been effective at small scale for particular communities but the improvements are not evenly distributed and much work remains to be done. A bottom-up, inclusive, community effort may be able to identify and tackle these big issues of coordination, funding, and incentive alignment. Open proposal writing, while new, is a great way to engage multiple stakeholders at the start of the process. It enables coordinated efforts across the various fields of research and the different funding opportunities around the world.  We take inspiration from the OpenDreamKit community and their successful open proposal experience.
  • Position papers: a longer paper, not previously published, up to 8 pages, that if accepted can be conveyed in a 15 to 20 minute talk, on Track 2: Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software, specifically discussing what we can do to improve sustainable scientific software in the short term, starting with where we are today.
  • Experience papers: a longer paper, not previously published, up to 8 pages, that if accepted can be conveyed in a 15 to 20 minute talk, on Track 2: Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software, specifically discussing current practices and experiences and how they have been used to improve the quality of today’s research software and/or the experiences of its developers.
  • Presentation of previously published work: a short paper, up to 2 pages, that if accepted can be conveyed in a 15 to 20 minute talk, describing a previous published work by the authors and its relevance to Track 2: Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software on the topic of improving the quality of today’s research software and the experiences of its developers by sharing practices and experiences.
  • Demos: a short paper, up to 2 pages plus 2 pages of screenshots, that if accepted can be conveyed in a 10 to 15 minute demonstration, showing a tool or process relevant to Track 2: Practices & experiences in sustainable scientific software, that improves the quality of today’s research software and/or the experiences of its developers. Demo submissions may be based on previously published work.

Submission process:

All submissions should be in PDF format.  They should begin with a title, author names and affiliations, a short abstract, then the body of the submission.  The title should begin with “Lightning talk:” or “Idea paper:” or “Position paper:” or “Experience paper:” or “Previously published:” or “Demo:”.  Submissions should also include a statement of their license, preferably CC BY 4.0.  Submissions should be made via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wssspe4.  WSSSPE4 accepted submissions (except presentations of previously published work) are planned to be published by WSSSPE as a special collection in http://ceur-ws.org/, which is fully indexed.  Authors retain copyright to their work and are free to self-publish their submissions or accepted papers elsewhere in addition.

Preliminary Agenda

Sept 12 (pm)

Joint session of both tracks

  • Introduction
  • Lightning talks
  • Updates on actions and activities from WSSSPE3 working groups
  • Discussion and planning for the remainder of WSSSPE4

Parallel tracks

  • Initial meetings of each track, introductions to track events, …

Sept 13

Joint session of both tracks

  • Keynote – Patricia Lago, Title to be announced

Parallel tracks

  • Track 1: This will be a set of working sessions with a facilitated discussion, breakout sessions, report backs, and active writing towards the track goal of defining a vision of the future of open-use research software, and a plan of activities that are needed to get there.
  • Track 2: Presentations of position papers, experience papers, previously published works, and demos; and breakout sessions or unconference sessions.

Sept 14 (am)

Parallel tracks

  • continued work in tracks

Sept 14 (1:30 pm – 5 pm) – Joint session of both tracks

  • Panel on best practices
  • Summary and discussion of each tracks’ progress
  • Planning for future events

Organizing Committee:

  • Gabrielle Allen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Jeffrey Carver, University of Alabama, USA
  • Sou-Cheng T. Choi, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
  • Tom Crick, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK
  • Michael R. Crusoe, Common Workflow Language project
  • Sandra Gesing, University of Notre Dame, USA
  • Robert Haines, University of Manchester, UK
  • Michael Heroux, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
  • Lorraine J. Hwang, University of California, Davis, USA
  • Daniel S. Katz, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Kyle E. Niemeyer, Oregon State University, USA
  • Manish Parashar, Rutgers University, USA
  • Colin C. Venters, University of Huddersfield, UK

Program Committee:

  • David Abramson, University of Queensland, Australia
  • Lorena A. Barba, George Washington University, USA
  • Ross Bartlett, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
  • Christoph Becker, University of Toronto, Canada
  • David Bernholdt, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA
  • Stefanie Betz, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
  • Coral Calero, Universidad Castilla La Mancha, Spain
  • Ishwar Chandramouli, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, USA
  • Ruzanna Chitchyan, University of Leicester, UK
  • Neil Chue Hong, Software Sustainability Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK
  • Karen Cranston, Duke University, USA
  • Ewa Deelman, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, USA
  • Dave De Roure, Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK
  • Charlie E. Dibsdale, O-Sys, Rolls Royce PLC, UK
  • Alberto Di Meglio, CERN, Switzerland
  • Anshu Dubey, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
  • Nadia Eghbal, Independent Researcher (via Ford Foundation), USA
  • Peter Elmer, CERN, Switzerland
  • Martin Fenner, DataCite, Germany
  • David Gavaghan, University of Oxford, UK
  • Mike Glass, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
  • Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK
  • Joshua Greenberg, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, USA
  • Michael K Griffiths, University of Sheffield, UK
  • Sarah Harris, University of Leeds, UK
  • James Hetherington, University College London, UK
  • Fred J. Hickernell, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
  • Caroline Jay, University of Manchester, UK
  • Rafael C. Jimenez, ELIXER, Cambridge, UK
  • Matthew B. Jones, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
  • Nick Jones, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), NZ
  • Jong-Suk Ruth Lee, National Institute of Supercomputing and Networking, KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information), Korea
  • Sedef Akinli Kocak, Ryerson University, Canada
  • James Lin, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
  • Frank Löffler, Louisiana State University, USA
  • Gregory Madey, University of Notre Dame, USA
  • Ketan Maheshwari, University of Pittsburgh, USA
  • Steven Manos, University of Melbourne, Australia
  • Chris A. Mattmann, NASA JPL & University of Southern California, USA
  • Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, Mozilla Science Lab, USA
  • Robert H. McDonald, Indiana University, USA
  • Lois Curfman McInnes, Argonne National Laboratory, USA
  • Chris Mentzel, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, USA
  • Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Christopher R. Myers, Cornell University, USA
  • Jarek Nabrzyski, University of Notre Dame, USA
  • Cameron Neylon, Curtin University, Australia
  • Aleksandra Pawlik, New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI), NZ
  • Fernando Perez, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • Marian Petre, The Open University, UK
  • Marlon Pierce, Indiana University, USA
  • Andreas Prlic, University of California, San Diego, USA
  • Karthik Ram, University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • Morris Riedel, Juelich Supercomputing Centre, Germany
  • Norbert Seyff, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • Arfon Smith, GitHub Inc, USA
  • Borja Sotomayor, University of Chicago, USA
  • Edgar Spalding, University of Wisconsin, USA
  • Maria Spichkova, RMIT University, Australia
  • Victoria Stodden, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Matthew Turk, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA
  • Ewout van den Berg, IBM Watson, USA
  • Nancy Wilkins-Diehr, San Diego Supercomputer Center, University of California, San Diego, USA
  • James Willenbring, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
  • Scott Wilson, Cetis LLP, UK
  • Theresa Windus, Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory, USA