In 2014, the Gordon & Betty Moore foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation together established three centres for Data Science in the US, at the University of California Berkeley, at New York University, and at the University of Washington.
In 2015, the UK’s National Institute for Data Science, the Alan Turing Institute, was established as a joint venture of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Warwick and University College London, with the EPSRC. In 2017 this was expanded to include the Universities of Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, Exeter, and the Queen Mary University of London.
In each of the above institutions, significant attention is being paid to the development of research software to understand and create value from complex, large, sensitive and fast flowing data: research software engineering for data science. Further, each of these institutions is taking a leading role in establishing the new research career structures that will sustain this activity: the Research Software Engineers
In 2017, the UK's EPSRC created a funding stream to bring together Research Software Engineers between the US and UK.
This proposal seeks to establish an ongoing exchange program between RSEs and Data Scientists in the above institutions, to create a rich transatlantic community of expertise in programming for data science. Funding has been received from the US-UK RSE travel fund for the inward leg of this exchange, to bring US RSEs to the UK institutions, and has been matched with reciprocal funding from the UK institutions for the outward leg.
This programme is managed through this Github Repository.