Research Software Engineers

The Aalto Research Software Engineers (RSEs) provide specialist support regarding software, computing, and data. As research becomes more digital and computer-dependent, the prerequisite knowledge grows larger and larger, and we exist to help you fill that gap.

We support people, not software or infrastructures. For anything related to custom software development, computational research, data management, workflow automation, scaling-up, deployment of public previews, collaborative work, reproducible research, optimization, high-performance computing, and more, we can be the collaborator you need. We can either give quick support or do longer term projects, either as a collaborator or leader.

Service availability: Our daily help session SciComp Garage is available to researchers at Aalto for free. There is various funding for medium-length (days–weeks) projects from various units at no cost to you.** Longer projects (months+) are generally expected to have their own funding.

Contact

It’s best to talk live! Come to our online office hour (“SciComp Garage”) any workday at 13:00. You don’t even need a specific question; you can ask about a vague idea, if we are even the right place to ask, or drop by to chat about your experiences. This is also a good place to ask about larger projects with us.

See Contact RSEs for other ways to contact, including email.

Brief intros

• Contact RSEs
• For researchers and research groups
• For group leaders
• For grant applicants
• For units who would like RSE services
• Examples of past projects

Project procedures

• Project lifecycle
• Starting a project (group leader info)
• RSE financial practicalities

Below this point is advanced material you only need to check if you have a special interest.

About the research software engineers

• RSE community
• Become a RSE
• Video: Aalto RSE status report, May 2021
• Video: Support services vs diversity
• 2022 Aalto RSE report
• 2023 Aalto RSE report
• 2024 Aalto RSE report

Checklists

• Project starting template doc
• RSE project done
• Python project checklist
• JOSS review criteria (external)
• pyOpenSci guides (external)
• rOpenSci guide (external)
• Matlab project reproducibility (external)

Other pages on this site: Package your software well, The Zen of Scientific computing

Team internal documents

We believe in openness, so make our procedures open. They may be out of date and are subject to change at any time. Also see the FCCI Tech seminar series for how our broader team works internally.

• Project management: RSE perspective
• Message templates
• Prioritization and reporting
• Outreach material
• Participating units
• Job descriptions
• Advisory board
• Template projects
• Implementation (2020 plan)
• RSE internal training
• History of Aalto RSE

Other similar services

• The University of Helsinki also has a Research Software Engineering group.

• The CSC optimization service is essentially a RSE service, targeted to CSC/LUMI resources (but in theory can do more). They are good at low-level programming kind of things. With funding, they can also collaborate on other projects.

• The Nvidia AI Tech Center provides free RSE services for research projects for Finnish Center for AI members (includes Aalto).

Other links

• Aalto Scientific Computing, the organization behind this program.

• Nordic RSE community, currently in the process of being formed (Aalto SciComp and the RSE program is a member).

• Our page on aalto.fi.

• History of the RSEs concept

• Who is a RSE?

• Keynote video by Mike Croucher on the rise of RSEs and their benefits

• The UK RSE association is quite advanced in promoting RSE careers.

• RSE international.

• Why do we exist?

  • Note the bottom section on page 105(print)/106(PDF) of the 2018 Research, Art, and Impact assessment.

  • Point three of Vision for Nordic Open Science Data Collaboration, by the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration 2022 program committee.