There are some who call me … Tim
Hey everyone,
My name is Tim Rice.
As one of the new Research Community Coordinators in ResBaz the time has come
for me to introduce myself.
An image of Tim
In 2008 I graduated from a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Mathematics & Statistics focusing on applied maths and the theory of random processes. My thesis with Kostya Borovkov involved developing a probabilistic model to look at how population density affects virus deadliness.
Used under licence CC-BY-NC-SA from DeviantArt/Tess-27
When I finished my degree I wasn’t sure what type of work I wanted to get into. Naive notions came to mind about applying mathematics in some industrial or commercial management career. I didn’t know at the time how much I would end up falling in love with academia and developing a passionate obsession for all things computational! Working as a sessional tutor in Maths & Stats and as a programmer in MASCOS, then having material from my thesis published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology, helped provide an initial exposure to the types of work that later came to seem ever more fun and important to me.
Another image of Tim
I spent 15 months as an Operations Analyst with Defence Science & Technology Organisation. It was interesting to work with people deployed to Afghanistan and Timor Leste, but most day-to-day tasks weren’t super top secret. My main niche was to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to develop administrative tools. This was necessary because deployed defence computers are heavily locked down; any new software always needs to go through an exhaustive (and exhausting) security audit. One thing that could be counted on was that these computers always had Microsoft Office installed. This meant requests for new functionality could often be addressed by writing an app in VBA.
After a while I began to miss the freer academic environment; furthermore the ubiquitous reliance on clumsy, heavy-duty proprietary software was at odds with my preference for the lean, mean Unix approach to scientific computing. So, I returned to Melbourne to commence a PhD in computational genomics. Unfortunately my PhD experience was beset by turmoil from various quarters. After it began heading in a non-computational direction, away from what I wanted to be doing, it became difficult to progress and I eventually decided to withdraw.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m ready to give up on research! My plan is to see whether I can pursue a Masters in the area of Computer Science. If successful this will put me in a better position to focus on a PhD in a heavily computational area.
An image of COMBINE
My first exposure to Research Platforms and Research Bazaar came via COMBINE, which I’ve been involved in for a couple of years. COMBINE and ResBaz have often helped each other run Software Carpentry workshops for grad students and early career researchers in the life sciences. ResBaz had lots of interesting people and I began making appearances at HackyHour to chat about computational topics and help people with any problems they’re having in their research. I also bumped into a few more ResBaz people at HealthHack 2014.
I guess I did something right because recently for MozSprint 2015 ResBaz asked me to begin putting together material for a LaTeX workshop. I thought it would be a breeze but it turns out building a workshop from scratch takes a lot of time! Hopefully it will begin looking fairly complete over the next month or so and after that we can do a pilot run. The intended audience will be LaTeX novices who need to use it for their theses and journal submissions. It might also be of interest to people who want a deeper understanding of how tools like Authorea work under the hood.
Hacky Hour
So far I’m really enjoying working with the ResBaz team. The culture is very warm and dynamic, and everyone is always working on something fascinating. It remains to be seen which particular niche will end up becoming my special superpower. I have some crazy ideas such as teaching a bit of C programming, first of all for its high performance aspects, but also because C incentivises small modular programs and removes some of the “black box” feeling of higher level languages. I’d also like to see whether we can help people make the most of powerful text editors like Vim or Emacs.
Whether or not such left-field ideas attract interest, I still look forward to helping everyone discover better ways to do digital research and scientific computing. It is a real privilege to be able to assist anyone doing research, and very exciting to contribute to the development of intellectually rich and computationally empowered research communities.
If you want to keep track of what I’m working on or thinking about, follow me on GitHub as cryptarch or on Twitter as @0x7472. I also write about a miscellany of computational, mathematical and statistical topics on my Department of Maths & Stats website.
If you want to discuss ways I can help your research community, you can either email me at t.rice@ms.unimelb.edu.au ― or better yet come along to Hacky Hour and have a chat in person!
I hope to see you soon!
