Building a data intensive research workforce for the Mid Atlantic

While "drone manager" and "self-driving car mechanic" may not be commonplace on job-hunting sites yet, they will be in the future as more technologies powered by artificial intelligence (AI) take hold, according to Monster.com, a global employment website.

As the use of AI increases, so does the need for new kinds of workers in the places where research is being conducted, including the nation's research universities, industries, government labs, hospitals, libraries and museums.

Whether predicting the path of a hurricane or discovering more effective drug therapies, researchers will benefit from the expertise of a new professional on the team - the research software engineer (RSE) - who has both a keen understanding of the science at hand, coupled with advanced computational skills in AI and machine learning.

The University of Delaware will be at the forefront in training these professionals, thanks to a nearly $4.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The initiative is led by Professor Sunita Chandrasekaran, the David L. and Beverly J.C. Mills Career Development Chair in computer and information sciences and co-director of the AI Center of Excellence, and her colleagues Rudi Eigenmann, Tom Hsu, Ben Bagozzi and John Huffman from electrical and computer engineering, civil and environmental engineering, political science and international relations, and information technologies, respectively.

The grant, awarded through NSF's Strengthening the Cyberinfrastructure Professionals Ecosystem (SCIPE) program, will support UD's development of an academic pipeline for RSEs, including their education, training, certification and career development. Howard University, Delaware State University and Lincoln University - all Minority Serving Institutions - will be close collaborators.

"We are so excited to receive this grant," Chandrasekaran said. "With the explosion of data all around us and new AI technologies, our RSEs will play an important role in solving real-world problems while enhancing fields currently underserved by AI, such as the coastal sciences and the social, behavioral and economic sciences."

But, as Chandrasekaran explained, it's not as though an RSE will pop into a research team for a few days, generate some computer code, and move on.

"We will be focusing on interdisciplinary work, training students to speak both languages - the science and the software - as they work alongside researchers on their projects," she said. "RSEs will not only play a key technical role on individual research projects, but their work will contribute more broadly to improving software and advancing science.

"We are creating unicorns," she noted. "And we're trying to create so many of them that they are not unicorns anymore."