3.5 WP5, Training

3.3 WP3, Quantum Dynamics

A training session on the E-CAM Load Balancing ALL took place on the 11th December 2020, in the form of a webinar. Three key lectures have been recorded and stored on E-CAM’s Online training portal here.

Societal impact

The societal benefits of the results achieved in WP4 of E-CAM are twofold. At the fundamental level, the software modules developed are expected to provide new avenues for material modeling and will make it possible to have an impact on the prediction of the properties of new materials, and in general in material science. This will be complemented by the tools developed within the project to improve performance and scalability of the codes (such as the ALL), with potential for benefiting the broader community.

At an economic level, industry will benefit from software containing efficient and easy to use simulation and analysis tools to extract observables for applications in sectors such as pharma, materials or house-hold products. These developments can provide support in applications including but not limited to:

• Drug handling: kinetics of biopolymers, proteins and membrane interactions;

• Food/dairy industry: protein aggregation, grain size in ice cream, food preservation, food stability and texture control;

• Tyre industry: development of novel composite materials, determination of rheological properties of materials;

• Materials science and daily products: surfactant kinetics, material stability, soft matter, self-assembly of nanomaterais, colloids, liquid crystal based materials, liquid-surface interactions;

• Oil industry: studies of flow in porous media.

Society can benefit greatly from the development of new computational algorithms and the corresponding software that make the development of new materials cheaper and improve food quality and products in daily use.

The pillars of the training in E-CAM were the ESDWs, transversal training events in collaborations with PRACE, and the online training infrastructure.

We held 30 training events during E-CAM (18 of which, ESDWs); trained 474 participants at different stages of their careers at these events, and ESDW participants opened 90 software modules that were certified. Lectures originating from these events were recorded in our training portal at https://training.e-cam2020.eu/.

E-CAM’s online training portal is built is Clowder, which is developed at NCSA. Clowder is a research data management system designed to support any data format and multiple research domains. E-CAM has expanded the capabilities of Clowder to be able to, among other things:

• shrink the input video to just 1.2MB per minute for full HD video (roughly the same size as simple stereo audio files)

• extract the slides from the captured presentation and prepare them for the previewer

• create a navigation panel for the video allowing the user to easily jump between slides in the video (and allowing slide navigation to be auto-synchronised with the video)

• when URLs are giving as teaching material, display previews of target URL (as well as some additional site information)

• change the file format for the slide metadata images, saving up to 70% of the space required for these images.

So far, we have 129 datasets on the portal, with lectures captured at our training events. Lectures are given a license according to the speakers consent (through a consent form circulated at ESDWs). The vast majority of lectures are fully public.

Lectures have tags, allowing users to aggregate results by scientific topic. A video tour of our online training portal is at this location.

Collaborations with other players are also being explored to ensure the sustainability of our training portal, which we believe is extremely valuable for the community, especially in a period where events are running mostly online with lectures being recorded and stored massively. More specifically, a collaboration will start between CECAM/ECAM, MaX and the NCCR centre MARVEL, to explore our development efforts in the Clowder platform and set up a state-of-the-art web portal for training and dissemination material and beyond.

WP5 analysed the profile of the participants to our ESDWs and performed surveys, for events happening between 2016 and 2021. Below we report on the analysis of

1. the participants profile (country of residence, gender, qualification),

2. the satisfaction surveys,

3. training needs highlighted by the participants of our ESDWs.

Profile of ESDW participants

The country of residence for the people participating at our ESDWs is listed in Table 1. United Kingdom, Germany and France represent the countries where the majority of people come from, followed by different countries spread around Europe and beyond. 8% of our participants come from countries outside the EU, and among these the US (4%).

In respect to gender, we have 16% of female participation to our ESDWs (see Table 2).

Table 1: Country of residence for the participants of our ESDWs.

Country

United Kingdom Germany France Ireland Netherlands Spain Switzerland Italy Austria United States

%

17 16 15 9 6 6 5 5 5 4 Norway 2 Other countries in the EU 3 EU-13 countries 3 Other countries outside the EU 4

Table 2: Gender balance at our ESDWs.

Gender % Female 16 Male 84

The majority of people attending our ESDWs are senior scientists (professors, assistant professors, lecturers) or scientists (post-docs, researchers, programmers, research software engineers), followed by PhD students, master students and industrial researchers. See Figure 2 for more details on this distribution.

Figure 2: Position occupied by the people attending our ESDWs.

Participants surveys

E-CAM sends out surveys to the participants of its ESDWs, at the end of each event. The survey is anonymous and helps E-CAM to improve the quality of E-CAM extended software development workshops by reviewing the participants’ replies to 15 key questions. There are also spaces for people to make additional comments if they wish.

Figure 3 summarizes the answers from 73 participants to 11 of our ESDWs, to the following questions selected from the survey:

1. Impact of the meeting on your research

2. Was there enough discussion time at the meeting

3. Evaluate the science presented

4. Evaluate the software developed

5. How much did you learned during the meeting

6. Evaluate the quality of the training material provided

7. Did you started the development of one or more software modules to include in the E-CAM repository

8. Was there enough support for the development of your modules.

The participation rate to the survey corresponded to 35% of the total number of participants to these workshops. The feedback that we got clearly showed that workshops will trigger interesting new approaches on people’s research (with 14% of the people expressing that it will have a major influence on their research). 91% of the people acknowledged the time dedicated to discussions at the meeting, whether discussions were guided by a specific topic, and their relevance and topicality. The majority of participants evaluated the science as being of a really good quality and 16% considered it as being leading edge. The software developed at the meeting was considered better than what they would have expected by 41% of the participants. It was confirmed that the majority of people learned software best practices at the meeting, and that the training material provided was above average to excellent. 74% of the participants to our ESDWs started the development of one or more software modules to include in the E-CAM Software repository, and almost the totality of people judged that there was enough support for the development of software.