UK Autumn School 2010: an enjoyable and educational experience

Outreach

The Software Carpentry / SoundSoftware.ac.uk UK Autumn School 2010 presented by Dr. Greg Wilson was an invigorating and inspiring educational event.

This one-week intensive Autumn School aimed to train PhD students and researchers in the software development skills required to build reliable research software quickly and with a minimum of effort, and so maximize the impact of their research.

The 22 students who attended the course are carrying out research in a variety of areas across the spectrum of audio and music research, with a varied level of background experience in software development (read something about the people at the Autumn School here).

We started with basic use of the Python interpreter and running simple Python programs—Python being a highly suitable language to convey useful concepts in software construction, as it is much easier than many to read and comprehend. Moving on to topics such as reading and writing files, the use of higher-level data structures such as dictionaries, test-driven development and the red-green-refactor cycle, we worked on a number of practical tasks and often in pairs.

A practical session on the use of version control to manage changes in software and data, including some useful thoughts on handling provenance and reproduceability issues for experimental results, proved one of the most popular subjects during the week.

Further sessions covered simple database management using SQLite for managing data such as experimental test results, rapid user-interface usability testing, use of libraries available with Python for audio processing, and how to communicate effectively about research work.

The content for the school was underpinned by a strong philosophical promotion of the importance of scientific method and the use of evidence in determining best practice for software development.

Video footage from the school is now available here.

Tweets by @soundsoftwareuk

Recent notes

MLSP Prizes for Reproducibility: Winners announced!

Announcing the winners of the MLSP 2014 and SoundSoftware.ac.uk Prizes for Reproducibility in Signal Processing, organised by SoundSoftware.ac.uk in conjuction with the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing.

SoundSoftware 2014: Videos now available!

The SoundSoftware 2014 workshop, our third annual workshop on software and data in audio and music research, was just as enjoyable as the previous two. Because so much research in this field ends up being expressed through software, a software workshop turns out to be all about the means by which research becomes useful and relevant to people other than the original researchers—fertile ground for interesting and thought-provoking talks.

The workshop videos are now available online at http://soundsoftware.ac.uk/soundsoftware2014, so if you weren't able to make it in person, catch up here!

Our third annual one-day workshop on Software and Data for Audio and Music Research takes place on the 8th of July 2014 at Queen Mary, University of London. The workshop includes talks on issues such as robust software development for audio and music research, reproducible research in general, management of research data, and open access. Read more here, clear your calendar, and register now!