OpenDreamKit

A project funded by the Horizon 2020

European Research Infrastructures Work Program

Progress report for Université Paris-Sud

Progress report for Université Paris-Sud

Viviane Pons, Benoît Pilorget, and Nicolas M. Thiéry

Reporting period from March 2017 to October 2018

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Finance and administration

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Hiring

One Project Manager on WP1 and WP2

UPSUD is hiring a new project manager following the departure of B. Pilorget on August 31st 2018. We have already had two unsuccessful runs of interviews since April 2018; we are running a third one now and hope to hire somebody soon.

One postdoc on WP6

UPSUD hired on the O1/01/2018 , and for a duration of 18 months, Dr Florian Rabe as Postdoc. He will be working half-time on WP4 and WP6. Florian will be spending the other half of his time at FAU with Pr. Kohlhase working on the same thematics.

One Research Software Engineer

Using leftovers from Florian’s half post-doc and other planned positions, UPSUD has hired Odile Benassy as Research Software Engineer early June until the end of the project. She is working on the technical/Jupyter side of Florian’s tasks in WP4 and WP6, and in particular T4.5 dynamic documentation and exploration system

Three part-time trainees on Communication

Elisabeth Pluquet, Jeannette Nwedeck, Dilan Kocabey. The three of them were on their second year of Master’s degree in digital communciation.Half of their time was spent in a company, the other half was spent working on two academic projects with their teacher. OpenDreamKit was one of this projects. Monitored by B. Pilorget and V. Pons their work focused on: writing a communication plan, developing the website towards end-users, and creating media (videos, articles, interview etc.) to help us communicate and disseminate outside our communities.

The main outcome of their work has been a new design for the website and some directions for video interviews.

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Achievements

1st Review

The review of the first Reporting Period (18 months) was organized in Brussels by UPSUD on the 26th of April 2017. All in all the work due for M18 was done and the overall feedback was very positive from our Project Officer and reviewers. See Nicolas Thiéry’s debriefing notes for more information.

2nd amendment

This amendment catered for the move of Michael Kohlhase and Hans Fangohr and their respective teams to new institutions. This led to the addition of to locations (FAU and XFEL) respectively and the termination of Southampton.

Workplan revisions and 3rd amendment

At the occasion of the review, we were strongly encouraged to propose revisions to our work plan, based on our latest vision of the project and its landscape, in order to maximize the effectiveness and impact of our resources.

UPSUD led the process, getting work package and site leaders involved, as well as our advisory board. Our proposals were accepted with very minor changes by the reviewers and implemented in a third amendment to the grant agreement:

This amendment was the occasion to officially terminate Jacobsuni and UZH where all resources had been spent and no personnel remained.

All changes were implemented in the github repository.

The amendment is fully complete with the signature of the Commission.

4th amendment

A fourth amendment is required to allow the change of position of Mike Croucher to the University of Leeds. The principle of this amendment was accepted both by the Commission and the Steering Committee. Though practicalities are not over with yet, the retroactive addition of the partner (and termination of USHEFFIELD) will start from 01/05/2018.

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Work in progress

OpenDreamKit and EOSC

Numfocus Europe

Advocacy for open science and open source software in French institutions

Portability and build system for SageMath

Misc technical achievements

Communication strategy

-The creation of a 2 minutes motion graphic explainer video with Pix Videos in on the way, based on the sketches created by Juliette Belin from Logilab.

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Workshops and dissemination activities

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Sage and OpenDreamKit dissemination:

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ODK Use Cases

Since Fall 2017, we are using a Jupyter Hub and the newly developed Cling C++ kernel in our 400 student introductory programming course at Paris Sud. This is the occasion to test those technologies both from a technical and pedagogical point of view. We contributed back through many bug reports and feature requests.

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