April 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for April!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or anyone interested in research software. (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse)

The purpose of this newsletter is to update you about JuRSE community initiatives at FZJ and some of the national and international activities in Research Software Engineering and inspire you to get involved in the community. 

Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.

Two quick ways you can get involved:

JuRSE news

A new training course from JuRSE - JuDocS course ‘Research Software Engineering: Take Control of Your Research Code’ - 6th-9th May, 9am to 12pm. 
This training provides you with essential skills to take control of your research code. Key topics include setting up a code project, collaborating effectively, ensuring reproducible code, designing code with the user in mind, implementing testing strategies, leveraging continuous integration, and understanding software publication and licensing. You will also explore the principles of good code projects. It is recommended for first-year doctoral researchers. Registration (for PhD students): https://intranet.fz-juelich.de/en/topics/young-researchers/events/research-software-engineering-rse250506   More info: https://intranet.fz-juelich.de/en/topics/young-researchers/judocs/tfs/managing-doctoral-projects

And don’t forget to check out the HIDA courses (see below). If you can’t see the course you need or want, get in touch with us. We may know where to find an alternative and we’re always interested to hear what resources our community needs. Contact cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de, Claire Wyatt, Community Manager Research Software Engineering.

More JuRSE travel grants! Deadline 4th April
JuRSE is again providing some competitive travel grants (https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-travel-grants )for FZJ employees to attend the UK RSE Conference (September, https://rsecon25.society-rse.org/ ) and US RSE Conference (October, https://us-rse.org/usrse25/ ). Check out their websites for more information about the themes and what/how to submit. 

The travel grant covers the full trip: travel, accommodation, registration fee, and a daily allowance as per the usual business trip rules. All the information about how to apply and what is expected is on our JuRSE website but feel free to email us if you have a question rse@fz-juelich.de orcl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de. Deadline for travel grant submissions is the 4th April 5pm CEST.

Open Hours (every Wednesday - https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-open-hours)
All are welcome to come and talk to us about anything and this is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge so everyone is welcome to join.

Over the last month, we were happy to have visitors from different institutes. One of the topics discussed was the goals and steps for making research software open source. Other conversations centered around software citation, Docker images, backup approaches, metadata file formats, tools for live plotting of experimental data, problems with handling dependencies, and installations using Pixi.  That’s why we are here! Come join us for one of the next Open Hours!

JuRSE Code of the Month
The JuRSE Team want to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being primarily developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich and to do this we’re showcasing one research software a month. This month’s code is developed at the Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine, Structural and Functional Organisation of the Brain (INM-1).

CellDetection is an open-source Python package, offering advanced AI methods for the identification and segmentation of biomedical objects, such as cells, in image data. Includes trained models that work out-of-the-box for a wide range of use cases. Read more about it on our website:https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/jurse-code-of-the-month/april-2025

Program-oriented funding (PoF)
You may know that the PoF reviews are underway at the moment on campus. In case you are presenting or contributing, be prepared for questions concerning your research software and remember to talk about JuRSE! https://intranet.fz-juelich.de/en/media/news/2025/research-under-review-pof-just-around-the-corner

Update about the deRSE25 Conference
February saw the JuRSE team and a group of FZJers head to the annual conference (https://events.hifis.net/event/1741/ ) for Research Software Engineering in Germany and this year it was hosted at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Karlsruhe. It was a packed programme (https://events.hifis.net/event/1741/contributions/ ) as per previous years with five parallel tracks filled with talks, workshops, birds of a feather sessions, and a poster session. To read more about it and hear from the JuRSE Travel Grant Awardees, go to the JuRSE website: https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/the_latest/derse25-karlsruhe

HiRSE News

The JuRSE team works closely with the HiRSE project so we include their news here too.https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/

Helmholtz Codes! Workshop - 4th to 6th November 2025 – Berlin
HiRSE, HIFIS, and HIDA are hosting a 3-day invitation-only workshop for people writing and maintaining research software within Helmholtz. During this event, we will discuss options on how Helmholtz could further support our daily work in research software engineering. Together with you, we would like to envision three scenarios:

1.      What if there is no additional money coming in for research software?

2.      What if we had a huge amount of money waiting for us?

3.      What if this amount were small(er)?

More info about the workshop:  https://events.hifis.net/event/2329/

41st HiRSE Seminar - Bridging the Gap Between Private Data and AI: A Beginner’sguide to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)’
Join us on Wednesday 2nd April at 2pm CEST to hearfrom Mascha Schmidt, Victor Haguet and Fritz Niesel from theApplied Machine Learning Group based at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. For the full abstract https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/series/2025_04_02-seminar_41.html  and no registration needed, just join us on zoom: https://fz-juelich-de.zoom.us/j/66397597271?pwd=TmdSdGRudGc5QjI0ZjBLWmI1Mlk0UT09 . If you missed it, you can catch it later on our YouTube channel and the slides will be on the HiRSE Zenodo channel.

More speakers needed! We’re always looking for more speakers for this seminar series so please email Claire (cl.wyatt@fz-juelich.de) if you have a suggestion.

Promoting research software: Made in Germany
We now have 75 codes in this initiative. Can we get to 100 codes soon?! Check out the codes that are already taking part in this campaign:https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/rse/community-initiatives/the-hirse-code-promotion

What is this initiative all about? Researchers, postdocs, and students at German universities and research centres write great research software. The HiRSE team wants to make that more visible by bringing your software to the attention of the RSE Community and beyond. We’re looking for research software created, extended and/or maintained by people working at German institutions to join our latest initiative. This is not meant exclusively, we of course welcome also software written by international teams, as long as there is a substantial contribution coming from Germany.

Here is our offer: You provide us with the details of your software using our form https://go.fzj.de/research_software_promotion and we’ll create your promo slide that will be shown ahead of a HiRSE Seminar and during HiRSE event breaks. If you have more ideas where this slide can be used, feel free to let us know (and use it yourself, of course)!

If you have any questions or would like to suggest a project that is not your own, please do not hesitate to contact us under hirse@fz-juelich.de.

HIDA Training courses
Check out all the relevant courses for research software engineering on the HIDA course catalogue like Data processing, Continuous Integration, Graphics with R and lots more: https://www.helmholtz-hida.de/course-catalog/en/

National Initiatives

The Klaus Tschira Foundation’s call for proposals (https://klaus-tschira-stiftung.de/foerderungen/naturwissenschaftliche-software/) on the topic of “Software in scientific research” has led to collaborative projects between de-RSE and its partners, including:

  • FutuRSI: Conception and Start-up Phase of a German Research Software Institute aims to develop a prototype service organisation for research software engineering (RSE) in Germany, with distributed teams nationwide. This officially starts on the 1st April 2025.
  • Excellent Research Software (RSE Award) aims to promote the quality and visibility of research software through an RSE award. The award is intended to create incentives for high-quality software development, highlight best practices, and strengthen the RSE community.
  • Research Software Engineering Master’s program aims to develop a specialised curriculum for RSE. It will create a reference curriculum, pilot it in existing degree programs, and serve as the foundation for establishing official RSE degrees in the long term.

RSE podcast episodes

Upcoming events

Nordic-RSE, Sweden - May 20-21, 2025
The 2025 edition of the Nordic-RSE conference will be held in Gothenburg on May 20-21 approximately 9-17 CEST. If you are interested in Research Software Engineering and want to connect with the community in the Nordics, you are warmly encouraged to join.Call for contributions are now open with a deadline of the 16th March. https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2025/

RSEHPC@ISC25 Workshop: Tools and Techniques for Continuous Integration and Benchmarking, 13th June 2025, ISC, Hamburg
It has long been understood that there is a strong overlap between the  fields of HPC and RSE. Although the two are not entirely congruent, the  techniques used and the communities are closely interlinked. Three keynotes will set the stage for the workshop, showing what has been  achieved so far and how Cx plays a vital role for running, procuring and planning HPC machines. Read more: https://www.helmholtz-hirse.de/events/2025_06_13-rsehpcatisc.html

RSECon25 – Warwick, UK - 9th-11th September
The ninth annual conference for Research Software Engineering (RSECon25) will be hosted at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK from 9-11 September 2025.The call for submissions is open now as is the JuRSE Travel Grant applications (see above). For more info: https://rsecon25.society-rse.org/

US-RSE’25 - 6-8 October, Phildadelphia, USA
‘Code, Practices, and People’  - the third annual conference from the United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE), to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October  6-8, 2025. Call for submissions is open now as is the JuRSE Travel grant applications (see above). More info on the conference: https://us-rse.org/usrse25/participate/

Last Modified: 07.05.2025