June 6th 2024 – 11:00-12:00pm
Speaker: Shurui Zhou, University of Toronto
Abstract: Scientific open-source software (OSS) has greatly benefited research communities through its transparent and collaborative nature. Given its critical role in scientific research, ensuring the sustainability of such software has become vital. Earlier studies have proposed sustainability strategies for conventional scientific software and open-source communities. However, it remains unclear whether these solutions can be easily adapted to the integrated framework of scientific OSS and its larger ecosystem. In my presentation, I will discuss a recent case study on the Astropy project, a key software ecosystem in astrophysics. The study highlights current practices and challenges in sustaining scientific OSS, proposes methods to address these issues, and identifies areas needing further research. Additionally, I will touch on another ongoing project that involves refactoring scientific software.
Bio: Shurui Zhou (https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~shuruiz/) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on facilitating distributed and interdisciplinary software teams to build high-quality systems, including but not limited to building better programming environments for software developers, designing better code review and issue tracking systems to facilitate better collaboration among team members, and identifying vulnerabilities from the codebase. She studies and tackles the problems from both technical and social perspectives, especially in the context of modern open-source collaboration forms, Industrial plant software, and interdisciplinary teams when building AI-based systems and scientific software. She also investigates the collaboration challenges for hardware teams, specifically for CAD designers using online collaborative platforms. To achieve her goals, she combines advances in tooling and software engineering principles with insights from other disciplines that study human collaboration, for which she combines and mixes a wide range of research methods.
