eScience Editorial Team

73 posts

The eScience Center Blog editorial team, bringing you the latest in research software engineering.

Git41 Community31 Collaboration31 RSE27 Machine Learning16 API14 Research Software13 Environment11

Jul 16, 2026

A holistic approach to professional technical digital research is possible

By Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Jeremy Cohen, Marta Teperek, Martine de Vos, Paula Martinez Lavanchy, Thomas Pronk DOI: doi.org/10.61686/pyrfg72916 This post has also been published on the Open Science NL b...

May 28, 2026

Research Software Engineers in the Age of GenAI: Same Value, Changing Practice

Stephan Druskat, Michelle Barker, Ian Cosden, Cunliang Geng, Robert Haines, Daniel S. Katz, Joseph Shingleton, Ben van Werkhoven This blog post is being cross-posted by the Research Software Alliance...

May 15, 2026

Co-Designing a Roadmap for Training on Research Software Templates and Code Auditing

Training materials are most effective when they are created hand-in-hand with the communities who will actually use them. Photo of the eventBy Manuel G. Garcia and Serkan Gigin. Training materials are...

Apr 9, 2026

FOSDEM 2026: Observations and key takeaways

If you missed FOSDEM 2026 — the largest conference dedicated to open-source software — you can still absorb some of the experience as shared by NLeSC RSEs Flavio Hafner, Ole Mussmann and Faruk Diblen...

Mar 26, 2026

Bring Your Own Backend

A pattern for sustainable research software collaboration By Stefan Verhoeven. Image source https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/new-nationwide-modeling-points-widespread-racial-disparities-urban-heat-stre...

Mar 18, 2026

Give Me Data, Yesterday

I want this data, and I want it yesterday!This post is adapted, with the author’s permission and collaboration, from this post in his personal blog. This is a quest. A quest for the right tool for th...

Feb 11, 2026

Enabling best practices for sustainable software in the Natural & Engineering sciences (SS-NES)

Enabling best practices for sustainable software in the Natural & Engineering sciences (SS-NES) Authors: Roel Janssen, Jason Maassen and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz With the available constellation of d...

Dec 9, 2025

Strengthening Research Software Management in Dutch UMCs: Highlights from the Second DReaMS Community Meetup

Strengthening Research Software Management in Dutch UMCs: Highlights from the Second DReaMS Community Meetup Written by Anna Niehues, Özgün Balaban, Magnus Palmblad, Mariia Steeghs-Turchina, and the D...

Oct 23, 2025

Why companies win by investing in Open-Source Software

Why would a for-profit company want to invest in Open-Source Software? Our collaborator, prof. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers will tell you why. CC-BY license from: Kojima T, Oishi K, Matsubara Y, Uchiyama Y, F...

May 20, 2025

Scientific Community Building through Workshops: the NPLinker eScience experience

This blog post is written by Wageningen University & Research Assistant Professor Justin van der Hooft, who participates in the Open eScience Call 2021. His project “A community-supported workflow...

Mar 25, 2025

Introduction to Deep Learning with Python

Written by Sven van der Burg, Carsten Schnober, Sarah M. Brown and Toby Hodges Engineers and instructors at the eScience Center have developed lots of open source lesson materials for the workshops we...

Jan 16, 2025

My experience of getting codechecked

6 By eScience Fellow Eduard Klapwijk This year I was finalizing and publishing one of my own research projects. My coauthors and I took many steps to make the project as reproducible as possible. Beca...

Dec 20, 2024

Out of office: holiday mode activated

As the year winds down, the Netherlands eScience Center editorial team will be taking a short hiatus for the holidays to recharge and prepare for an exciting year ahead. While we’re away, we’ve curat...

Dec 6, 2024

How much research output is really open, and how can we tell?

Written by Esther Plomp, Meron Vermaas, Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Nemo Andrea, Ewan Cahen, Felix Weijdema, Dorien Huijser, Marta Teperek, Bjørn Bartholdy & Ana Parrón Cabañero. During the Open Scienc...

Dec 5, 2024

How is research software managed at UMCs? Insights from a first meetup

Written by eScience Center Fellow Thomas Pronk On October 7th, 2024, the Digital Competence Centers (DCCs) of the seven Dutch University Medical Centers (UMCs) had a meetup, joined by representatives...

Dec 3, 2024

Tackling Advent of Code

By Ewan Cahen Advent of Code 2024 has started this week! If you are not familiar with Advent of Code, it’s an annual coding challenge created by Eric Wastl. It’s like an advent calendar for coding cha...

Dec 3, 2024

The ‘do-it-yourself’ Computed Tomography scanner

By Francien Bossema Researchers developed a method to use existing X-ray imaging facilities for Computed Tomography (CT) scanning Photo by Cara Shelton on Unsplash This is a cross-post from our fellow...

Nov 26, 2024

From Pandemic Response to Package Development

By Fenne Riemslagh We had the pleasure of sitting down with Kirsten Bulsink, a data scientist at the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). Our discussion covered her j...

Nov 14, 2024

Why should you care about reproducible code — and how to get started?

On 23 April 2024, the first ‘National Research Software Day’ took place in Hilversum, the Netherlands. During the unconference part of the program, Eduard Klapwijk ran the session about the importance...

Oct 30, 2024

Beyond research

Beyond research ‘Beyond research’ is a new mini-series we are starting on the eScience Center blog. We want to give you some insight into the interests, hobbies and accomplishments of our colleagues....

Oct 24, 2024

From Corridor Coincidences to Cellular Cartography: The grlc Story

1 This is the story of grlc, a tool that transforms complex linked data queries into user-friendly web interfaces. We interviewed grlc’s developers Albert Meroño-Peñuela and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, to...

Sep 19, 2024

National Research Software Day: National Infrastructures for Sustainable Software

Written by Luisa Orozco, Daniela Gawehns, and Carlos Martinez-Ortiz The first National Research Software Day already took place more than five months ago in Hilversum, on 23 April 2024. Following an i...

Aug 22, 2024

Research software is critical to the future of AI-driven research

By Michelle Barker, Kim Hartley, Daniel S. Katz, Richard Littauer, Qian Zhang, Shurui Zhou, Jyoti Bhogal Cross-posted from ReSA and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada Photo credit: TheMezereon Th...

Jun 12, 2024

Brainstorming on the success of a research software catalogue

Brainstorming on the success of a research software catalogue 1 Researchers reflect on the whys and hows of scientific software catalogues Created with DALL-E. Timestamp: 2024–04–23 14.57.58 Prompt: C...

Mar 19, 2024

The FAIR for Research Software Principles after two years: an adoption update

By Michelle Barker, Leyla Jael Castro, Bernadette Fritzsch, Daniel S. Katz, Carlos Martinez-Ortiz, Anna Niehues, Alexander Struck, Qian Zhang Click here for citation information for this article. The...

Dec 12, 2023

How to ensure that others can run your code

6 By Julian Gonggrijp This blog was originally written for the Utrecht University (UU) website by Scientific Programmer Julian Gonggrijp. We enjoyed this useful blog post, and hope you will too! If yo...

Nov 28, 2023

Navigating research software policies: Insights from the Dutch research community

Navigating research software policies: Insights from the Dutch research community Imagine you’re a researcher who developed a brilliant piece of software that may be useful to many. Maybe it’s a singl...

Nov 2, 2023

Investing in people: anticipating the future of research software

Authored by Kim Hartley and Michelle Barker Photo credit: ADORE.Software at the International Research Software Funders WorkshopThis article was cross-posted on Adore.software and reports on the progr...

Sep 21, 2023

Do you have 50.000 annotators?

Do you have 50.000 annotators? Written by eScience Center Fellow, Daniela Gawehns Photo by Shutterstock During ICT.open 2023, I organized a workshop for 40 computer scientists on reproducibility in co...

Jul 10, 2023

Summer is here, and so are large language models.

Welcome to the technological revolution of 2023, where the landscape of communication and information processing has been forever transformed. Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash The early months of...

May 16, 2023

Creating a Community by Integrating Expertise, Tools and Ideas

A personal reflection on the first NPLinker eScience workshop for Natural Product Discovery By Justin van der Hooft This blog post is written by Wageningen University & Research Assistant Professo...

Mar 2, 2023

Minds for Mobile Agents: speeding up social distancing simulations

This blog post is written by University of Amsterdam researchers Charlotte Tanis and Andrew Heathcote, who participated in the Small-Scale Initiative for Software Performance Optimization. Their team’...

Jan 19, 2023

Why internships have a large impact

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash One and a half years ago I finished my internship at the eScience Center. Based on my own experiences and those of others around me, I think that internships are a u...

Jan 12, 2023

The Data Science Centre: Digital expertise Hub at UvA

This week, we interviewed Lisa Yu, Community Manager of the Data Science Center (DSC). The DSC is a coordinating hub within the University of Amsterdam (UvA) Library, launched in 2021. The need for so...

Dec 16, 2022

Machine Learning as a tool for political speech analysis

The following example of a sentence from Putin’s invasion-speech may clarify what CM annotation of texts involves: ‘The purpose of this operation is to protect people Effect who, for eight years now,...

Nov 23, 2022

The Future of Research Software

By Michelle Barker (Research Software Alliance (ReSA)), Neil Chue Hong (Software Sustainability Institute UK), Maria Cruz (Dutch Research Council), Daniel S. Katz (National Center for Supercomputing A...

Nov 22, 2022

Software in the spotlight: launching the Research Software Directory

The RSD has been in use by the Netherlands eScience Center as a prototype for several years. Open source software for research lies at the heart of the mission of the Center. The eScience Center colla...

eScience

Oct 27, 2022

How to manage your software

Today the Netherlands eScience Center and NWO released a Practical Guide to Software Management Plans (SMPs). The Software Management Plan Working Group developed the Guide with input from many member...

Aug 16, 2022

Our favourite high performance programming tools

Does your code need a performance boost? Ask us! Photo by Alenka Skvarc on Unsplash We hope you are relaxed and enjoying your holiday period. We really do. So it may seem ironic that this blog post is...

Aug 2, 2022

Our favourite Python tools for research

Photo by Ethan Robertson on Unsplash Ah, summer. A time to relax, go on holiday, and learn new things. At the eScience Center, we love summer. And we love Python. So, for summer, we’ve put together o...

Jun 13, 2022

Studying political symbolism in Turkish TV dramas with machine learning

Studying political symbolism in Turkish TV dramas with machine learning eScience Editorial Team·Jun 10, 2022 Faced with a challenge of this type, Machine Learning can come to the rescue to address ard...

eScience

May 23, 2022

The mystery of glass: why machine learning can help us

This blog is part of our blog series: The Small-Scale Initiative on Machine Learning, how did it go?, where groups who were invited to participate in a project with eScience Center Research Software E...

May 9, 2022

A machine learning approach to laughter

Our mentors at the eScience Center (Patrick Bos, Florian Huber, and Jisk Attema), provided us with practical guidance in the use of such libraries, which provided an invaluable learning opportunity. F...

Apr 22, 2022

Using machine learning to tell apart rain, snow, hail and fog from cell tower data

Using machine learning to tell apart rain, snow, hail and fog from cell tower data eScience Editorial Team·Apr 21, 2022 Next, we explored whether CMLs can be used to detect fog. Fog consists of drople...

eScience

Apr 11, 2022

Can machine learning help us improve stroke rehabilitation? A step towards personalized therapy

Along the way, the biggest issue was our data set itself. Because data collection of human movements is a job that takes time and our patient group is small, we only have a limited amount of data avai...

Mar 31, 2022

How machine learning could help Simone to play Ludo

Simone is a 12 year old girl. She loves to play Ludo with her mum, dad and her little brother. However, when she pushes the dice switch in the middle of the Ludo board game, she cannot properly contr...

Mar 11, 2022

How to find your rubber duck: Using machine learning to understand a changing sea

To get a quick start, they applied for the eScience Center Small-Scale Initiative (SSI), and were awarded consultancy on their project titled “Machine Learning for the complex response of the Wadden S...

Mar 11, 2022

Parsing Hebrew and Syriac morphology using Deep Learning

State-of-the-art technology meets ancient literature This blog is part of our blog series: The Small-Scale Initiative on Machine Learning, how did it go?, where groups who were invited to participate...

Oct 27, 2020

C++ web app with WebAssembly, Vega, Web Worker and React

To generate the Vega-Lite specification we can write a function like so To wrap the Vega-Lite visualization in React component we will use useRef to get a DOM element as container and use useEffect to...

eScience

Oct 9, 2020

Help! My C++ web app is not responding

By Stefan Verhoeven, Christiaan Meijer, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, and Adam Belloum. In an earlier blogpost we discussed how to run C++ code on the web using JavaScript. We created a web app th...

Oct 9, 2020

Interact with your C++ web app using React forms

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Adam Belloum, and Christiaan Meijer. In a previous blog post, we compiled the C++ algorithm into WebAssembly. In the current blog post, we will c...

Oct 9, 2020

Spice up your C++ web app with visualizations

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Christiaan Meijer, and Adam Belloum. In a previous blog we found the root of an equation using the Newton-Raphson algorithm implemented in C++ an...

Oct 9, 2020

Using C++ in a web app with WebAssembly

By Stefan Verhoeven, Faruk Diblen, Jurriaan H. Spaaks, Adam Belloum, and Christiaan Meijer. Let’s say you have some C++ code laying around that you would like to make available to a wider audience, by...

Mar 12, 2020

The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Community Landscape

eScience Editorial Team·Mar 11, 2020 Some of the issues we’ve had in assembling this list are: How much interest in software does an organization need to have to be listed? When is an organization suf...

eScience

Dec 17, 2019

The success of reliable integration of renewable energy

Countries, companies and individuals are increasingly aware of the need to keep our world clean by supporting sustainable energy. The landscape is evolving rapidly. Of the various mechanisms considere...

Dec 9, 2019

Managing the crowd: a big data approach

Crowd disasters have taken many lives. The Love Parade disaster (Duisburg, 2010), the Ellis Park Stadium disaster (Johannesburg, 2001), the PhilSports Stadium stampede (Manila, 2006) are just a few re...

Nov 28, 2019

Optimizing plasma sources through numerical simulation

Optimizing plasma sources through numerical simulation Cold plasma sources are promising devices for the transformation of carbon dioxide into methane and other value-added chemicals. These sources h...

Jul 18, 2019

Using deep neural networks to understand molecular interactions

Photography: Michiel Wijnbergh | wijnbergh.nl Dr. Lars Ridder, Prof. Alexandre Bonvin, Dr. Nicolas Renaud, Dr. Li Xue, Dr. Sonja Georgievska The human body contains trillions of cells. These cells, wh...

Apr 4, 2019

understanding global corporate networks

Members of the CORPNET group at the University of Amsterdam Frank Takes is an assistant professor at Leiden University and member of the CORPNET group at the University of Amsterdam, where he was pre...

Dec 17, 2018

using agile methods in scientific software development

Photo: www.unsplash.com Software plays an increasingly important role in all aspects of the modern scientific enterprise. The practice of developing scientific software, however, is still young and u...

Dec 17, 2018

using agile methods in scientific software development 1

Dec 3, 2018

how do we evaluate research software to meet different requirements

Software written to solve research questions gains more recognition as a research result of its own and requires evaluation in terms of usability as well as its potential to facilitate high-impact an...

Nov 29, 2018

nice hydrographs for everyone from everyone

“Nice hydrographs! Can you now compare your model to ‘that other hydrology groups model’?” The phd student suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. Her supervisor is asking her to go back into code-hell...

Sep 26, 2018

analyzing the ‘life’ of newspapers with machine learning

Marcel Broersma, professor of Media and Journalism Studies and Director of the Research Centre for Media and Journalism Studies (CMJS) at the University of Groningen Photography: Elodie Burrillon | h...

Jul 12, 2018

what we can learn from tomatoes — feeding the planet with improved plant breeding

From left to right: PhD candidate Gurnoor Singh at Wageningen University and Research, Dr. Richard Finkers from the Wageningen Plant Research institute and Dr. Arnold Kuzniar from the Netherlands eSc...

Jul 11, 2018

the end of theory for earth sciences

“The end of theory.” This is the title of an article in Wired Magazine 10 years ago. No theory needed, the data deluge allows us to extract any knowledge by exploring data. This new empiricism receive...

Apr 13, 2018

research and software perspectives from different communities

Last week the Principal Investigators collaborating with the eScience Center’s team came together to share experiences on collaborative research projects. Photography: Elodie Burrillon Our work is dri...

Dec 20, 2017

digital technologies to analyze eyewitness accounts of mass violence

Dr. Susan Hogervorst, historian, assistant professor in historical culture and history didactics, Open University of the Netherlands, and researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam Photography: Elodi...

Dec 20, 2017

introducing nl-rse

Bootstrapping the community of Research Software Engineers in the Netherlands. Research software has become an indispensable instrument for virtually every academic researcher. A case in point: survey...

Oct 18, 2017

teaching machines to recognize cancer

Jeroen de Ridder, Associate Professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht Photography: Elodie Burrillon | http://hucopix.com Jeroen de Ridder is Associate Professor at the University Medical Cen...

Jul 17, 2017

an ambition for the global astronomical community

Making the data produced by the rejuvenated Westerbork Telescope more open for, and delivered faster to, the astronomical community Joeri van Leeuwen, Dutch astrophysicist, ASTRON and University of Am...

Jun 21, 2017

what is the impact of visualization on science

Scientific visualization impacts all research disciplines. Understanding our past, dealing with the challenges of climate change, discovering dark matter, and analyzing human behavior are all areas wh...

Apr 3, 2017

how can network analysis lead to a new way of studying court decisions

Gijs van Dijck, Professor of Private Law, Maastricht University Photography and text: Elodie Burrillon / HUCOPIX Gijs van Dijck is a young professor of Private Law at Maastricht University. For the l...

← All posts

eScience Editorial Team

A holistic approach to professional technical digital research is possible

Research Software Engineers in the Age of GenAI: Same Value, Changing Practice

Co-Designing a Roadmap for Training on Research Software Templates and Code Auditing

FOSDEM 2026: Observations and key takeaways

Bring Your Own Backend

Give Me Data, Yesterday

Enabling best practices for sustainable software in the Natural &amp; Engineering sciences (SS-NES)

Strengthening Research Software Management in Dutch UMCs: Highlights from the Second DReaMS Community Meetup

Why companies win by investing in Open-Source Software

Scientific Community Building through Workshops: the NPLinker eScience experience

Introduction to Deep Learning with Python

My experience of getting codechecked

Out of office: holiday mode activated

How much research output is really open, and how can we tell?

How is research software managed at UMCs? Insights from a first meetup

Tackling Advent of Code

The ‘do-it-yourself’ Computed Tomography scanner

From Pandemic Response to Package Development

Why should you care about reproducible code — and how to get started?

Beyond research

From Corridor Coincidences to Cellular Cartography: The grlc Story

National Research Software Day: National Infrastructures for Sustainable Software

Research software is critical to the future of AI-driven research

Brainstorming on the success of a research software catalogue

The FAIR for Research Software Principles after two years: an adoption update

How to ensure that others can run your code

Navigating research software policies: Insights from the Dutch research community

Investing in people: anticipating the future of research software

Do you have 50.000 annotators?

Summer is here, and so are large language models.

Creating a Community by Integrating Expertise, Tools and Ideas

Minds for Mobile Agents: speeding up social distancing simulations

Why internships have a large impact

The Data Science Centre: Digital expertise Hub at UvA

Machine Learning as a tool for political speech analysis

The Future of Research Software

Software in the spotlight: launching the Research Software Directory

How to manage your software

Our favourite high performance programming tools

Our favourite Python tools for research

Studying political symbolism in Turkish TV dramas with machine learning

The mystery of glass: why machine learning can help us

A machine learning approach to laughter

Using machine learning to tell apart rain, snow, hail and fog from cell tower data

Can machine learning help us improve stroke rehabilitation? A step towards personalized therapy

How machine learning could help Simone to play Ludo

How to find your rubber duck: Using machine learning to understand a changing sea

Parsing Hebrew and Syriac morphology using Deep Learning

C++ web app with WebAssembly, Vega, Web Worker and React

Help! My C++ web app is not responding

Interact with your C++ web app using React forms

Spice up your C++ web app with visualizations

Using C++ in a web app with WebAssembly

The Research Software Alliance (ReSA) and the Community Landscape

The success of reliable integration of renewable energy

Managing the crowd: a big data approach

Optimizing plasma sources through numerical simulation

Using deep neural networks to understand molecular interactions

understanding global corporate networks

using agile methods in scientific software development

using agile methods in scientific software development 1

how do we evaluate research software to meet different requirements

nice hydrographs for everyone from everyone

analyzing the ‘life’ of newspapers with machine learning

what we can learn from tomatoes — feeding the planet with improved plant breeding

the end of theory for earth sciences

research and software perspectives from different communities

digital technologies to analyze eyewitness accounts of mass violence

introducing nl-rse

teaching machines to recognize cancer

an ambition for the global astronomical community

what is the impact of visualization on science

how can network analysis lead to a new way of studying court decisions

Enabling best practices for sustainable software in the Natural & Engineering sciences (SS-NES)