These presentations are intended to inform, educate and share ideas with an audience of peers, experts, or other interested parties in the field of Research Software Engineering. We are offering two different lengths this year: short presentations (12 min + 3 min for questions) and longer presentations (25 min + 5 min for questions). Where possible, presentations will be grouped together on similar topics.
Talks
The programme can cater for two lengths of talks:
- 15 minutes, consisting of a 12 minute talk with 3 minutes for questions
- 30 minutes, consisting of a 25 minute talk with 5 minutes for questions
You will be asked to indicate your preferred length during submission, but may be contacted and asked if you would accept a slot with a different length.
When considering topics for talks, please consider the key themes of this year’s conference:
- RSEs as part of the research journey
- Enhancing credit and reproducibility: research software quality, performance, and evidence
Previous talks include:
- JAX for Scientific Computing: Bridging the gap between performance, productivity and portability
- A Curated Collection of Software Quality Tools for Research: Insights from the EVERSE Technology Watch
- Shinyscholar – a template for creating reproducible Shiny applications in R
You are welcome to refer to these talks, and others in last year’s programme, for ideas on how to present your submissions. Please bear in mind that our conference themes change each year, and previous abstracts may not fully address the type of information requested during our submission process this year.
Walk-Throughs
Walk-throughs are presenter-led demonstrations that involve guiding participants through a process, and providing commentary and explanations along the way (e.g. live-coding or executing lines of a pre-prepared notebook). You may wish to supplement your live demonstrations with slides or pre-recorded material. While primarily intended for technical topics, please don’t be put off from making submissions on non-technical topics (such as using a specific project management tool). When planning your walk-through, the goal is to keep your scope narrow and focus on the depth of content. Aim to provide attendees with a good understanding of one particular aspect of a tool rather than presenting a broad insight into a range of features.
The walk-through should educate the audience about a tool or technique, and you will ideally provide enough detail to enable the audience to duplicate the process in their own time. If you would like to deliver a session where the attendees follow along in real time using their own device, you could consider submitting a workshop.
The programme can cater for two lengths of walk-through:
- 15 minutes, consisting of a 12 minute demonstration with 3 minutes for questions
- 30 minutes, consisting of a 25 minute demonstration with 5 minutes for questions
You will be asked to indicate your preferred length during submission, but may be contacted and asked if you would accept a slot with a different length.
Topics for walk-throughs have previously included:
- Can others reproduce your results? Recipes for using uv and pixi to manage Python dependencies
- Entity tagging and relation extraction from historical texts using deep learning
- Unit Testing in Fortran
You are welcome to refer to these, and others in last year’s programme, for ideas on how to present your submissions. Please bear in mind that conference themes and requested information change each year, so the abstracts there may not fully address this year’s themes and submission layout.
General Considerations
When submitting your proposal for a talk or walk-through you will need to consider:
- Title: Describe what your submission is about. (max 50 words)
- Abstract: Give a brief and attention-grabbing summary of your submission. People will read your title and abstract in the conference programme when deciding which sessions to attend. (max 250 words)
- Prerequisites: Describe the required skills or knowledge for an attendee to fully engage with your submission. Have you considered how accessible your session will be to a diverse conference audience (attendees comprise people from academia, industry, charity and government, from beginners to experts)? (max 150 words)
- Outcomes: How will your attendees benefit from your session? What do you expect them to gain/learn? (max 150 words)
- Accessibility: Please comment on how you will ensure your content is accessible, which may include referring to relevant sections of the conference’s accessibility guidance, as well as any other considerations. Some key pieces to consider are:
- Visually, have you considered the colours chosen as well as the shape and size of graphics and fonts?
- You can also use automated accessibility checking tools to help ensure that you haven’t missed anything.
- Hybrid Delivery: We appreciate that you may not have fully-formed answers to these questions at this stage, but your responses will enable the organisers to support you in delivering a successful presentation.
- How will you ensure that both remote and in-person participants have a comparable experience?
- Is there anything that might pose a challenge to streaming your proposal?
You will also be asked to provide:
- Author list identifying the corresponding author
- Presentation type (checkbox)
- Presentation length (checkbox)
- Conference theme: Please select the best-fitting conference theme for your presentation (checkbox)
- In-person or online delivery (checklist)
- Mentorship: If your submission is accepted, would you like a mentor? Subject to availability.
If you would like to take part in helping to review the submissions, the call for reviewers is now open.
The deadline for submissions is 23:59 BST on 1 May 2026.