For units such as departments, schools, or flagship projects

Our service is funded by departments and schools, and members of these units can receive our services free of charge for a short period of time (in accordance to the shares of funding). In addition to the basic service, researchers and group leaders can request long-term support which they pay for themselves.

By joining the Research Software Engineering service, you provide the highest-quality computational tools to your researchers, enabling the best possible research and attracting the best possible candidates. You fund a certain amount of time, and actual cost decreases when groups pay for long-term service themselves. For both short and long-term projects, our surveys indicate a significant efficiency: (researcher time saved) ≥ 5 × (time we spend).

Case study: Systematic improvements

Your department has a lot of people doing little bits of programming everywhere, but everyone is doing things alone. What if they could work together better? By joining the RSE program as a unit, your staff can get rapid help to understand tools to make their programming/data work better. After a few years, you notice a dramatic cultural shift: there is more collaboration and higher-quality work. Perhaps you already see a change in your KPIs.

Benefits

Benefits to schools/departments:

  • Increase the quality and efficiency of your research by providing the best possible tools and support.

  • Provide hands-on technical research services to your community at a higher level than basic IT (see Scicomp garage).

  • More societal impact, for example ChatGPT-type preview interfaces.

  • Help with data management, open science, FAIR data - be more competitive for funding and help get value out of your unit’s data.

  • You will be able to set priorities for your funding, for example do you focus on a certain strategy, wide variety of projects, high-impact project, etc.

Benefits to groups:

  • Receive staff/on-call software development expertise within your group, without having to make a separate hire, and at less than a full time equivalent. We don’t disappear right after your project.

  • Instead of just one person, you have the resources of our whole team available to you.

  • Your researchers focus on their science while improving their computational skills by co-working with us.

How to join

The RSE program is a part of Aalto Science-IT (Aalto Scientific Computing), so is integrated to our computing and data management infrastructure and training programs. You don’t just get a service, but a whole community of experts. We can seamlessly work with existing technical services within your department for even more knowledge transfer - if it matches their mission, your existing technical services can even join us directly.

In practice, joining us means that you contribute a certain amount of funding, which allows us to hire more staff (combined with the other departments), to provide a certain amount of time to research groups in your unit. This is easy with basic funding, but we can also use Halli to work with project funding.

If you would like to join contact Richard Darst or rse-group at aalto.fi.

Current sponsoring units

See Unit information