 So, yeah, thanks for inviting me here. I'm going to start off with a little discussion. So yesterday, we were actually having this discussion about, like, why do people come to lectures from, like, when there's videos or other things? Like, why do people come to lectures these days? Why would someone? And we started thinking, so it's not because of the content, but somehow it's because of the specialist, like, the support. So maybe that's the way that you could ask a question to someone without taking a lot of time. Well, the point here is that I think that the world has sort of fundamentally changed somehow. So no longer is it like, okay, go to these classes and learn some skills and then go do your work and start applying to it, applying it, and then you're done. But it's sort of a more interactive thing. So you're doing work and then you're getting support while doing it. And nowhere is that more visible than computational research, I think, because the amount of tools that someone needs to know in order to do this work have just increased so much. So that's what I'm here to talk about. So the Alto Research Software Engineer Service. So first we can ask why software? So it's used in almost all fields of science. So, and I don't just mean buying something commercially. So I mean, like when you have to go and sort of write your own code in order to do your own task. Or let's go beyond software. So what about managing your data beyond using an existing tool, but the data is so big you need to make your own data management software code scripts, whatever it may be. And when researchers do this themselves, is it useful? Is it correct? Is it able to be used in by anyone else or even themselves in a few months? Is it extendable for the future and so on? And more and more we see these days that top quality science is held back by people not able to do these kinds of skills. Like without the skills to do this as well as they could. People can often get by but not really thrive and succeed. So what's the research software engineer? So it's sort of a new term, but not a new idea. The term was invented in around 2012. But basically the idea is someone that's sort of between a researcher, but they aren't just purely focused on getting papers. And they aren't a software developer who's purely focused on these formal aspects, but someone who can survive in both the chaos of research and the structure needed to make top quality software. So who's a research software engineer? So maybe I can introduce myself and my team now. So I'm in the science IT team in the School of Science. And maybe a good description of us is these kind of people. So we're all researchers in our past life. We're all technology people now. And we bridge the gap between these two things. But we didn't focus on software and this kind of support specifically. So what does our new team do? So our new team was formed in, well, I guess, technically earlier this year. So it's a team of two to four people who work on exactly what I presented here. We're research software engineers and we go directly to groups and help them. So probably there's three types of ways we could, three types of things we do. First, there might be some groups who have a computational problem and they need someone to do it for them. Like it's not their specialty. They're not programmers. They don't want to be. We can do it for them. A second category is people who the groups are programmers themselves, but need someone to work with them to do it the best possible way because people don't have background doing the work. And finally, making it reusable. So we've actually seen this a lot. So researchers go and make some great computational method. And then the next person needs to come use it after the person has graduated and then it really can't be reused. And we can come and help fix things up and make it reusable and use best practices for the future. One other topic we added is planning ambitions. So if someone's applying for a grant and they want to do something big and they don't know what's possible, well, we can come in and help to figure out what can be done. So what are our skills? So it's not just software. Of course, it starts off with programming and software kind of things, but it can go to data, data-related things. It can take existing software to help scaling it up. So a lot has been said about the Lumi supercomputer, which CSC is running, and how everything needs to be made ready for that. Well, we can do that. Automation is a big one. So if someone can do something on their laptop, then we do it 100,000 times on a cluster. We can help with that. There's a lot that's been said about open science, and we can help go from software to open source software. And basically anything else you might need about the software data and computing stuff. So throughout the project lifecycle, we can be used at different points. So we can, again, the proposal phase, people come and talk to us, and we advise on how much software support they might need and can write our team directly into their grant. So we can use three months of this research software engineering service to do our project without having to hire someone. During the project, so we can help set stuff up and hand things off to people. We can directly do the development or some help with the visualization or analysis, whatever is needed. At the end, there's lots of things about spinning off the tools they have created into something that's reusable. So how does it work in practice? So we have a website here with both information about how to use us and also other tips about making software yourself and some practical things you may need to know. We have a direct email address, which can be used to initiate contact. You can also join our daily help session. So every day at one o'clock, we and other people from Science IT are in a Zoom meeting, and we just wait for people to come by and ask us questions. We divide up into breakout rooms or discuss together. It's actually a great place to learn things and get connected to our services. Who pays for this? So short-term projects are free, and it's funded by the partner units, which is mainly the School of Science. But now, thanks to IT services, we have a Digitalation Grant pilot, so we can spend a few months of time using this service throughout all of Aldo, and that's why I'm here. For longer-term projects, say greater than a month or so, the expectation would be that the project or group itself would fund our work. And for the really big projects, you can write our services directly into your grant application. Even if you hire someone else, we can work with you as sort of a long-term stability kind of thing here. And that's basically it. So if you have any questions or comments, I'm looking at the chat. And, um, yeah. Yeah, so, yes, yeah. And I see our role as sort of working along with the other existing teams. Like, for example, IT services has the cloud services team. So oftentimes people may request resources from there, but may not be able to use them fully, so we can help with that. Or the new data hub in the School of Business. So they'll be sort of cataloging the data and making it available when people need to use it. We may have a role there in things. I mean, the obvious synergy is with the rest of the Science IT team who runs our computer cluster. And then we're here and sort of make sure that everyone's able to use the cluster, not just those that already have the skills. Yeah, I mean, maybe if there's one lesson here that I'd like everyone to know, it's that the service is available. And then we have the daily grad session. And we're really happy for people to drop in. And even if it's a five minute chat, like, oh, I'm doing this, what's like, am I approaching this the right way? And we can give some hints and then come back. We really enjoy hearing all the things that people are doing to make sure that we're on a good track. So here's an altar.fi page that links to the altar.fi page is sort of like a summary page that leads to our detailed information, which incidentally all of our detailed information is an open source product posted with standard software development tools.