Event Details

The Research Software Forum is a series of short talks and mini-workshops on anything related to Research Software...

The Research Software Forum is a series of short talks and mini-workshops on anything related to Research Software. Talks can cover techniques researchers use, tools they have found useful, or how they use software and hardware as part of their research. These are designed to be more informal than formal training, and the talks are more of a starting point for discussions and networking.

We have two talks for this Forum, each is 15 minutes with time for discussion and questions afterwards.

Faster R code with Rust - by Nicola Rennie, Lecturer in Health Data Science

“My R code is slow”. It’s a common complaint, especially when data sets get bigger and models get more complex. Although there are many methods for optimising R code, sometimes you need to rewrite especially slow operations in another programming language. One of those languages might be Rust. This talk will demonstrate rewriting functions in Rust, calling Rust functions from R, and show a comparison of speed when using Rust for vectorising operations in R.

MapReader: An open software library for classifying map content at scale - by Katherine McDonough, Lecturer in Digital Humanities

Are you interested in analysing lots of images using basic computer vision methods? Do you wonder about how to use computational tools to do humanities research? Do you like historical maps? If the answer is yes to any of these, this demo of MapReader is for you. MapReader is an open software library developed by the Living with Machines digital history project for analysing large collections of scanned maps. To learn more, check it out: https://mapreader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#

Location: Digital Scholarship Lab in the Library