Author Archives: Alice Allen

In conclusion 1…

Here are a few slides from presentations mentioned in a previous blog post; slides from more of the talks at EWASS will be covered in another post.

Software development best practices from Astropy, Thomas Robitaille (slides: PDF)

All contributions are made in GitHub repositor(ies). All contributions are reviewed via pull requests. Test suite run using pytest. Docs written in Sphinx, hosted on ReadTheDocs. Continuous integration on Travis AppVeyor, Circle CI.

A Computer Science Perspective on the Astronomy Research Software Process by John Wenskovitch (slides: PDF)

Summary: 1. Acknowledgement of strengths. 2. Version control. a. Use it. b. Commit often. 3. Frequent communication. 4. Manage feature requests. 5. Collaborate with an expert.

TARDIS: A radiative transfer code, an open source community, and an interdisciplinary collaboration by Wolfgang Kerzendorf (slides: PDF)

Research software best practices: Transparency, credit, and citation by yours truly (slides: PDF, PPTX)

ASCL projects at the EWASS Hack Together Day

The European Astronomical Society (EAS) European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) meeting, held June 26-30 in Prague, had its first Hack Together Day, coordinated by Abigail Stevens (U Amsterdam), Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON), and Matteo Bachetti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari).

The projects were varied and some participants worked on more than one. I proposed two ASCL-related projects for this, both of which had willing participants. Daniel Evans (Keele U) worked on creating a dataset of keywords for ASCL entries based on their associated papers, and Jessica Kirkby-Kent (Keele U), Eleonora Alei (INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Padua) and I worked on finding preferred citation information for codes that didn’t have it. Since we were working from an open Google spreadsheet, the link to the spreadsheet was tweeted out several times during the Hack Together Day and later, allowing others not at EWASS to participate in this Hack Together Day project that day and in subsequent days, to good effect.

Kirkby-Kent, Alei, and I looked for preferred citation info for at least 184 codes and found this information for 45 codes, so we have a yield of 24.5% — we found citation information on 24.5% of the code sites we looked at. Another two codes had citation information added to them by unknown users during the Hack event, and later, citation information was added for several more codes. I spent last weekend with the data Kirkby-Kent, Alei, mostly anonymous others, and I gathered and adding the collected preferred citations to ASCL entries, editing a total of 52 entries to add this important information. I still have a bit of information to go through and get clarification on, and will soon add that, too, and then will go back through the Google spreadsheet again, as I see someone — I suspect Kirkby-Kent! — has been methodically adding more information. (Thank you!!)

Evans continued to build the dataset after EWASS and found a few bibcode anomalies along the way, which I’ll share with ADS at a later time. He has sent me email to let me know his searching is complete and he is getting the results into reasonable shape so this information can be added to the ASCL, too. Having this information will be very useful to anyone who uses the ASCL to find software. (Thank you!!)

I am so glad I participated in the Hack Together Day, and am grateful to Evans, Kirkby-Kent, Alei, and all others who gathered information for the ASCL, and to Jaodand, Stevens, and Bachetti for planning it. Thank you!

Developments and Practices in Astronomy Research Software at EWASS 2017

The annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS), the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS), was held June 26-30 in beautiful Prague. As mentioned in a previous blog post, Abigail Stevens (U Amsterdam), Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON), Matteo Bachetti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari), Rein Warmels (ESO), and I organized a Special Session titled Developments and Practices in Astronomy Research Software. Special Sessions at EWASS can be from one to three 90-minute blocks; we organized three blocks, each with its own focus and all scheduled on Wednesday, June 28, which were:

Best practices for code development and management
Perspectives in research software
Astronomy software packages review

The first two sessions opened with review talks, then had a series of slightly shorter presentations, each with a particular focus. Each of these sessions concluded with a 30-minute period in which the floor was open to all to ask questions of the speakers and discuss the issues and information that had been shared during the 90 minutes. The third session offered talks on specific popular software packages and concluded with lightning talks on the software posters submitted to this Special Session. In addition to this series of talks, a Hack Together Day was organized collaboratively that offered more information on and assistance with installing and/or using many of the software packages presented.

Session titles and presenters for the software sessions that Abigail Stevens (U Amsterdam), Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON), Matteo Bachietti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari), Rein Warmels (ESO), and I organize are listed below, and if you want to read through the Storify of session tweets, compiled by Stevens as a Hack Together Day project, that’s here: https://storify.com/abigailstev/developments-and-practices-in-astronomy-research-s

Best practices for code development and management
Moderator: Rein Warmels, ESO, Germany
This session opened with a talk by Simon Portegies Zwart (Leiden University, NL), author of AMUSE and other astro codes, on Reproducible science in scientific computing. He laid the groundwork for this block of talks by presenting the difficulties of reproducibility in simulation software, the best practices his group uses, and the philosophy behind AMUSE, which includes standardizing interfaces and automating as much as possible. His talk included simulations that made for an extremely large presentation file, so a partial set of his slides is provided.
(slides: PDF)

Simon Portegies Zwart

In the interest of time, I will not summarize the other talks in this block, but will say you should have been there! These were excellent presentations with many great practices and ideas shared. In the discussion, moderated by Warmels, someone asked about “short codes,” and as luck would have it, the next block had a talk on just that topic. There was disagreement on some voiced opinions, and many ideas shared that warrant greater discussion.

The other talks in this block were:

Software development best practices from Astropy
Thomas Robitaille, Freelance, UK (slides: PDF)

A Computer Science Perspective on the Astronomy Research Software Process
John Wenskovitch, Virginia Tech & Allegheny College, US (slides: PDF)

TARDIS: A radiative transfer code, an open source community, and an interdisciplinary collaboration
Wolfgang Kerzendorf, ESO, DE (slides: PDF)

Research software best practices: Transparency, credit, and citation
Alice Allen, ASCL, US (slides: PDF, PPTX)

Perspectives in research software
Moderator: Alice Allen, ASCL, USA/
Kai Polsterer (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, DE) set the stage for the second block in the Special Session with his presentation Reproducibility in Era of Data-Driven Science. He also highlighted the difficulties of reproducibility, among them that different computing environments can produce different results from the same code, and though he acknowledged the difficulties in doing so, advocates that publications, datasets (including raw and training data), codes, component and software configuration, and computing environments need to be shared for full reproducibility. Or as John Wenskovitch summarized in a tweet during this presentation, “Publish everything. EVERYTHING. Architecture, model, code, data, parameters, …” We are not there yet, but must share what we can when we can to increase reproducibility.
(slides: PDF)

Kai Polsterer, image by @K_Bonson

The other talks in this second of three blocks were:

Should short codes used for astronomy research be made public?
Robert Nemiroff, Michigan Technological University, US (slides: PDF, PPTX)

Giving credit where credit is due: the role of ADS in discovering and citing software in scholarly publications
Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US (slides: PDF)

Fifteen years of WISE technology software development and operations
Gijs Verdoes Kleijn, University of Groningen, NL (slides: PDF)

CDS reference services supporting astronomy research
Mark Allen, CDS, Observatoire Astronomique De Strasbourg, FR (slides: PDF)

Astronomy software packages review
Moderator: Amruta Jaodand, ASTRON, NL
The third block of talks in this Special Session presented software packages useful for software research, from the well-established AstroPy to, in the short poster presentations, newly-developed software such as SPARTAN. The talks in this 90-minute block were:

The Astropy Project
Thomas Robitaille, Freelance, UK (slides: PDF)

Stingray and Dave: Spectral timing for all
Matteo Bachetti, INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari, IT (slides: PDF)

Living on the fringe: Making CASA ready for VLBI
Ilse van Bemmel, JIVE, NL

Interactive widgets for the Jupyter notebook
Maarten Breddels, Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, NL (Jupyter notebook, ipywidgets demo (PDF), poster)

Lightning poster talks

Again, you should have been there! One blog post cannot possibly convey everything shared in this Special Session, but the slides the presenters have shared captures some of the great goodness in these talks. My thanks to all the presenters, to my co-organizers, and to the attendees who made this session so interesting and excellent, to EWASS for accepting our proposals, and to HITS for providing the ASCL with funding that allowed us to participate.

ASCL at the 2017 European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) meeting

The European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) was held June 26-30 in Prague and attended by over 1,100 people, and the ASCL was there! This post is an overview of the ASCL’s participation in the event; a subsequent post (or two) will provide more detailed information and links to slide decks for sessions the ASCL was involved in organizing.

Program page for software talks
Image by Amruta Jaodand

This was my first time attending EWASS, which was initially brought to my attention by Keith Smith (Science). It was also my first time in Prague. My activities since the meeting have included submitting proposals (with others) for EWASS 2018, which will be in Liverpool, and pricing short-term apartment rentals in Prague; clearly, I liked both the meeting and the city very much! My thanks to Keith for cluing me in to this fine meeting.

ASCL Advisory Committee member Rein Warmels (ESO) and I partnered with Abigail Stevens (U Amsterdam), Amruta Jaodand (ASTRON), and Matteo Bachetti (INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari) on software-related sessions for EWASS 2017; our collaboration resulted in a day of talks on Wednesday called Developments and Practices in Astronomy Research Software and a Hack Together Day on Thursday, this latter coordinated by Stevens, Jaodand, and Bachetti.

The ASCL was well represented, with ASCL co-founder Robert Nemiroff (MTU) giving a talk on short codes and Warmels and I each moderating 90-minute sessions on software, both with a discussion period; I also gave a presentation on the ASCL and participated in the Hack Together Day.

The Hack Together Day had numerous exciting projects; the ASCL’s projects were less glamorous than most others but yielded really useful information, some of which has already been added to ASCL entries.

Our collective efforts went very well, despite a few worrisome moments along the way. The room our Special Session presentations were in had 98 seats; perhaps 90% were filled for these sessions, and there were people also standing in the room. The presenters/presentations were great and the discussions were lively, and more information about these sessions will be posted soon.

There was of course much much more to EWASS than our efforts; notable for those software-inclined were the astrometry, big data, and astroinformatics sessions and associated posters for all of these sessions. In all, an excellent conference!