For units such as departments

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 up to X hours of free 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. We don’t disappear right after your project.

  • 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.

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