deRSE23

IAS-7 recently participated in deRSE23, the third conference in Germany that focused on research software and the people behind it within the German research landscape. The conference was held at the Heinz Nixdorf Forum (HNF) in Paderborn on February 20-21, 2023, and our team presented three talks and a poster.

During the conference, Ahmed Alia presented his talk on the DL4PuDe, an intelligent framework designed to automatically detect pushing behavior in videos of crowds. The framework employs a deep optical flow model, a CNN-based classification model, and a visualization method, achieving an accuracy rate of 86%. In another talk, Deniz Kilic discussed the challenges of developing and adding new features to our experimental video data extraction software PeTrack. He also had the opportunity to exchange ideas and discuss experiences dealing with challenges related to RSE, such as prioritizing refactoring versus adding new features.

Tobias Schrödter presented his poster on improving the usability and maintainability of our pedestrian trajectory analysis tool, JPSreport, by reimplementing it as a new library called PedPy. The poster outlines the methods and tooling used to ensure that the software meets users' requirements and enables them to use it productively in the future. Additionally, Mohcine Chraibi presented his talk on PED-DASHBOARD, a web-based exploratory visualization and interactive analysis of pedestrian trajectories.

Overall, the conference was a success and provided us with an opportunity to exchange ideas with other researchers and gain new perspectives on how researchers deal with software-related challenges during their research. Incorporating software into the cycle of research ensures reproducible and open-access solutions, and we were glad to be a part of the discussion.