Related papers: Software Use in Astronomy: an Informal Survey
Assessing writing in large classes for formal or informal learners presents a significant challenge. Consequently, most large classes, particularly in science, rely on objective assessment tools such as multiple-choice quizzes, which have a…
We present the results of a nation-wide baseline survey, conducted by us, for the status of Astronomy education among secondary school students in India. The survey was administered in 10 different languages to over 2000 students from…
Software has eaten the world with many of the necessities and quality of life services people use requiring software. Therefore, tools that improve the software development experience can have a significant impact on the world such as…
This document gives some quantitative facts about the role of women in Italian astronomy. More than 26% of Italian IAU members are women: this is the largest fraction among the world leading countries in astronomy. Most of this high…
Context: Jupyter Notebook has emerged as a versatile tool that transforms how researchers, developers, and data scientists conduct and communicate their work. As the adoption of Jupyter notebooks continues to rise, so does the interest from…
Programming is essential to modern scientific research, yet most scientists report inadequate training for the software development their work demands. Generative AI tools capable of code generation may support scientific programmers, but…
Context: Pre-publication peer review of scientific articles is considered a key element of the research process in software engineering, yet it is often perceived as not to work fully well. Objective: We aim at understanding the perceptions…
We provide a brief, and inevitably incomplete overview of the use of Machine Learning (ML) and other AI methods in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Astronomy entered the big data era with the first digital sky surveys in the early…
This year marks the consolidation of Julia (https://julialang.org/), a programming language designed for scientific computing, as the first stable version (1.0) has been released, in August 2018. Among its main features, expressiveness and…
The design of effective programming languages, libraries, frameworks, tools, and platforms for data engineering strongly depends on their ease and correctness of use. Anyone who ignores that it is humans who use these tools risks building…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
Agile software development is gaining popularity among software developers due to its benefits. As the interest in agile software development grows, there is an increasing focus on investigating sustainability within this field. This study…
Astrophysics lies at the crossroads of big datasets (such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Gaia), open source software to visualize and interpret high dimensional datasets (such as Glue, WorldWide Telescope, and OpenSpace), and…
Modern astronomical surveys such as the Large Synoptic Sky Survey (LSST) promise an unprecedented wealth of discoveries, delivered in the form of ~10 million alerts of time-variable events per night. Astronomers are faced with the daunting…
Agile methods have transformed the way software is developed, emphasizing active end-user involvement, tolerance to change, and evolutionary delivery of products. The first special issue on agile development described the methods as…
The use of programming languages such as Java and C in Open Source Software (OSS) has been well studied. However, many other popular languages such as XSL or XML have received minor attention. In this paper, we discuss some trends in OSS…
We present a comprehensive evaluation of proprietary and open-weights large language models using the first astronomy-specific benchmarking dataset. This dataset comprises 4,425 multiple-choice questions curated from the Annual Review of…
In the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, based on large language models that can generate programming code in any language, write texts and summarize information, it is obvious that the requirements of employers for…
We review the literature relating to soft skills and the software engineering and information systems domain before describing a study based on 650 job advertisements posted on well-known recruitment sites from a range of geographical…
Software is foundationally important to scientific and social progress, however, traditional acknowledgment of the use of others' work has not adapted in step with the rapid development and use of software in research. This report outlines…