Last month many members of the RSE Group and other Princeton colleagues attended USRSE’25, the third annual conference from US-RSE. Hosted this year in Philadelphia, the conference theme was “Code, Practices, and People.” Princeton University (authors in bold) contributions included:

1. Accelerating Research: Strategies from the Field – Jen Rosiere Reynolds, Lance Parsons, Gail Rosenbaum, Joost Wagenaar, and Sarah Stevens (BoF)
2. Sustainable Models of RSE Support: The Prospects of Centralization in Institutional Research – Eric Manning, Lori Bougher, Colin Swaney, and Sangyoon Park (BoF)
3. Undate: computing with uncertain and partially-unknown dates – Rebecca S. Koeser (notebook)
4. Integrating ATR Software with University HPC Infrastructure: balancing diverse compute needs – Christine Roughan and Rebecca S. Koeser (paper)
5. INnovative Training Enabled by a Research Software Engineering Community of Trainers (INTERSECT) – Jeffrey Carver and Ian Cosden (poster)
6. Building Scientific Python Packages – Henry Schreiner (poster)
7. Community Code Review in the Digital Humanities – Julia Damerow, Rebecca S. Koeser, Jeffrey C. Carver, and Malte Vogl (poster)
8. Surveying the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Landscape – Rebecca S. Koeser and Julia Damerow (poster)
9. Ten Simple Rules for Catalyzing Collaborations and Building Bridges between Research Software Engineers and Software Engineering Researchers – Nasir Eisty, Jeffrey Carver, Johanna Cohoon, Ian Cosden, Carole Goble, and Samuel Grayson (poster)
10. Developing a Machine Learning-Augmented Solver for the Hydrologic Model ParFlow – Georgios Artavanis, Laura Condon, Andrew Bennett, and Reed Maxwell (talk)
11. Everything, All at Once, Yesterday: Creating Research Software with Humanities Faculty – Jeri Wieringa and Mary Naydan (talk)
12. What happened to Curt’s arm? – Curt Hillegas (RAM)
13. Agile Foundations for RSEs: Building an AI Assistant with Agile – Tisha Charles and David Luet (workshop)

Additionally, Princeton University Professor Reed Maxwell delivered the first keynote address on Accelerating Continental-Scale Groundwater Simulation With a Fusion of Machine Learning, Integrated Hydrologic Models and Community Platforms. His keynote highlighted three of his lab’s software projects centered around hydrologic data, simulations, and visualizations, and he noted contributions to those projects from five current and past RSE Group members (Vineet Bansal, Calla Chenault, Georgios Artavanis, Amy Defnet, and Bill Hasling). Professor Maxwell stated that not only RSE contributions to software, but additionally that “RSEs enable digital education and outreach content.”

All in all, it was inspiring to convene with RSEs from all over the country. We already look forward to next year’s conference to be hosted in the San Francisco Bay Area!

The RSE Group was excited to send several members to US-RSE’24, the second annual conference from US-RSE, held this year in Albuquerque. The conference theme was “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A celebration of all that RSEs have done for computing in the past, in the present, and in the future.” Princeton University (authors in bold) contributions included:

1. Exploring the Potential Impact of Advancements in Artificial Intelligence on the RSE Profession – Sujay Suresh Kumar and David Luet (BoF)
2. Navigating the Remote Landscape: Working Effectively with Stakeholders – Troy Comi (BoF)
3. RSEs in domain-specific ecosystems – Julia Damerow, Rebecca S. Koeser, Laure Thompson, and Jeri E. Wieringa
4. INnovative Training Enabled by a Research Software Engineering Community of Trainers (INTERSECT) – Jeffrey C. Carver and Ian A. Cosden (poster)
5. Getting Scientist buy-in on best practices: A Case Study – Bob Caddy (RAM)
6. The quirks of leading technical staff – Curt Hillegas (RAM)
7. The Creation of an RSE Career Path at Princeton University – Ian A. Cosden, Joel Bretheim, David Luet, and Beth Holtz (talk)
8. Establishing RSE Programs – From early stage formalization to mature models – Ian Cosden, Sandra Gesing and Adam Rubens (workshop)

It was wonderful spending time together out in the desert celebrating RSE accomplishments and getting inspired for the year ahead to continue our efforts in building robust and sustainable research software. Next year’s conference will be much closer to home… Philadelphia!

The inaugural conference from the US-RSE Association just wrapped up in Chicago! Somewhat paradoxically, the gathering felt like a culmination and a new beginning all at once. It was the culmination of years of effort tracing back to 2017 when earnest discussions towards organizing the US-RSE began. Some RSEs who had collaborated online for years finally got to meet in person for the first time! It’s also a new beginning: the US-RSE has “grown up,” in a sense, and we hope this conference is the first of many more to come in the United States.

The conference theme was “Software-Enabled Discovery and Beyond.” Participants from academia, industry, government labs, and other research institutions across the country came together to discuss topics like software-driven discovery and scholarship, software technology trends, software engineering best practices, community engagement, training resources, and the ongoing quest to build and grow the RSE profession.

Our RSE Group sent a handful of representatives and contributed the following content to the conference’s technical program:

1. INnovative Training Enabled by a Research Software Engineering Community of Trainers (INTERSECT) – Ian Cosden and Jeffrey Carver (talk)
2. Princeton University’s RSE Summer Internship and Fellowship Programs – Joel Bretheim, Ian Cosden, Peter Elmer, Garrett Wright, Colin Swaney, Abhishek Biswas, Henry Schreiner, Kilian Lieret, and Vineet Bansal (talk)

It was gratifying to see the RSE community in the US come together in this way and collaboratively make our first ever conference a resounding success. On the final day of the conference, we learned it will indeed return next year and it will be hosted in Albuquerque!