Category: Guest Lecture

FONDA Winter 2025/2026 Lecture Series Begins Oct. 28

On selected Tuesday afternoons from October 28th 2025 to mid-February 2026, FONDA will host 2-3 short scientific talks on a variety of topics related to large scale data analysis and workflows in natural science. The complete schedule (subject to change) can be found here: FONDA Winter Lecture Series.

On October 28th, we will meet in the Humboldt-Kabinett (first floor seminar room of Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489 Berlin-Adlershof) at 15:15 for the following two talks:

  • Nikos Tsakiridis – University of Thessaloniki: From Petabytes to Pedons: Cloud-Native Earth Analytics for Soil Mapping
  • Matthes Rieke – 52 Degrees North: Biodiversity monitoring with openEO – a look at scalability and reproducibility

You can also follow our lecture series online.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Presentation By Mercator Fellow Caroline Jay

Title: Socio-Technical Resilience in Research Software Engineering

Date: 21.10.2025

Time:11:30-12:30

Location: Humboldt-Kabinett, Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489 Berlin

Abstract:

Software quality is influenced by a multitude of factors, from technical, to organisational, to cultural. This talk uses a ‘resilience engineering’ lens to study this issue. This entails examining what helps research software engineering (RSE) teams – and the codebases they create – to respond well and adapt to changes and threats, which are viewed as inevitable. It will explore the role of the professional identity in supporting resilience within the individual, and examine how resilience may be affected by the professional culture in which someone works.

Bio:

Caroline Jay is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Engineering Research at the University of Manchester, where she leads the institution’s AI for Research and Digital Infrastructure Strategies. She is qualified as both a Psychologist (BA, CPsychol) and Computer Scientist (MSc, PhD), and undertakes research exploring the relationship between humans and technology. She is Research Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and holds a Mercator Fellowship at Humboldt University of Berlin.

Snakemake Tutorial with Johannes Köster

FONDA has invited Professor Johannes Köster to give a tutorial on Snakemake, a widely used, python based workflow management system. Snakemake allows users to create scalable, human readable, reproducible workflows for scientific data analysis.

Professor Köster the leader of the Bioinformatics and Computational Oncology group at the Institute for AI in Medicine at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where his work focuses on reproducibility and bioinformatics workflows. He is the author and lead developer of Snakemake.

The full-day tutorial will be on July 02, 2025 starting at 9 am. Please contact Tobias Price if you are interested in attending.

NUMA, Portability, and AI: Three Bites of HPC

Guest Lecture by Ruben Laso

Date, time, and location:
Tuesday, July 1st, 11:15 am in the Humboldt-Kabinett (aka HUK, Rudower Chaussee 25, 1st floor)

Abstract:
In this presentation, we will cover three past and ongoing projects related to High-Performance Computing (HPC).

The first part will focus on NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) systems, showing how process and memory placement can be improved to reduce execution times.

The second part will discuss the feasibility of using standard C++ for performance-portable HPC applications, showing how C++ can be used to write code that runs efficiently on different hardware architectures without sacrificing performance.

Finally, we will explore the optimisation of GPU-GPU communication to improve the performance of AI applications. As modern workloads often involve significant data movement, there is an opportunity to tune communication libraries for better performance.

Bio:
Ruben Laso is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Group for Scientific Computing at the University of Vienna. He holds a PhD in High-Performance Computing (2023), a Master’s in Industrial Mathematics (2019), and a Bachelor’s in Computer Science (2017), all from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. His research interests include parallel computing, with a particular focus on manycore and NUMA systems, as well as performance portability in scientific codes.

Ruben will be visiting FONDA until mid-July.

Tutorial on Human-Computer Interaction with Thomas Weber

On June 12th from 10:00 -13:00 we will have a Tutorial on Human-Computer Interaction with Thomas Weber from LMU Munich. The event will be in the Humboldt-Kabinett. Everyone is invited to attend!

The abstract and bio Dr. Weber provided for the event can be found below.

Abstract:

Artificial Intelligence, especially Large Language Models, have proven
highly successful in many domains, including software development. New AI-powered tools not only increase the productivity of professional and novice software developers alike, they also enable completely new, highly flexible ways to interact with software. In this workshop, we will have a hands-on exploration of these capabilities and how they can enable and enhance rich and flexible interaction. However, integrating AI into interactive systems is not without challenges. Thus, we will also discuss how to design and evaluate AI-powered interactive systems to make sure they are both usable and useful.

Bio:

Thomas Weber is a post-doctoral research at LMU Munich. In his research, he investigates how AI-powered systems affect the lives and behavior of software developers from two perspectives: first, considering the rapid pace at which new and improved AI-powered tools emerge, how can developers use these tools productively to create high-quality software? However, software developers not only use AI but are also the ones building and shaping it. Thus secondly, how do requirements differ for building AI systems compared to traditional systems and how does this affect the behavior of developers.

To answer these questions, he combines methods from both software engineering research and human-computer interaction.

PI Lecture Series Part 6 (with guest!)

For our next set of Monday afternoon talks on March 3rd, Lars Grunske will give a talk on his research area “Understanding Software and DAW Input Spaces”, and we will have a guest lecture by Paul Ralph titled “Evidence Standards Improve Reliability in Scholarly Peer Review“. The talks will take place in the Humboldt-Kabinett of Johann-von-. Neumann-Haus, Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489, Berlin.

Abstract:

Background. Scholarly peer review is “the lynchpin about which the whole business of science is pivoted” (Ziman 1968). Most researchers believe peer review is effective (Ware 2008), but empirical research consistently shows that reviewers cannot reliable distinguish methodologically sound from fundamentally flawed studies (Cole 1981; Peters & Ceci 1982; Lock 1991; Rothwell and Martyn 2000; Price 2014; Ralph 2016). Consequently, we created comprehensive evidence standards and tools to improve peer review in software engineering and related fields. Objective. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of evidence standards on scholarly peer review. Method. A randomized controlled experiment was conducted at an A-ranked software engineering conference. The program committee was randomly divided into two groups: one using a typical conference review process; the other using a standardized process based on the ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research (https://acmsigsoft.github.io/EmpiricalStandards/) Results. Evidence standards significantly improve inter-reviewer reliability without harming authors’ or reviewers’ attitudes toward the review process. Reviewers using evidence standards gave more praise and focused more on research methods than style. Discussion. Asking reviewers to write free-text comments about a paper and score it on a 6-point scale from strong reject to strong accept produces data statistically indistinguishable from random noise. This means that decisions are determined entirely by reviewer selection, not the merits of the research. Conventional review processes are therefore scientifically and morally indefensible. While not a silver bullet, evidence standards significantly improve reliability, and the data collected in this study facilitates further refinement of the standards and tooling toward still greater reliability. 

Dr. D. Paul Ralph, PhD (British Columbia), B.Sc. / B.Comm (Memorial), is an award-winning scientist, author, consultant, and Professor of Software Engineering at Dalhousie University. His cutting-edge research at the intersection of software engineering, human-computer interaction, and project management explores the relationship between software teams’ social dynamics and success.

Photo of Paul Ralph in a blurry forest