SciPy 2025

Recent breakthroughs in large language model-based artificial intelligence (AI) have captured the public’s interest in AI more broadly. With the growing adoption of these technologies in professional and educational settings, public dialog about their potential impacts on the workforce has been ubiquitous. It is, however, difficult to separate the public dialog about the potential impact of the technology from the experienced impact of the technology in the research software engineer and data science workplace. Likewise, it is challenging to separate the generalized anxiety about AI from its specific impacts on individuals working in specialized work settings.

As research software engineers (RSEs) and those in adjacent computational fields engage with AI in the workplace, the realities of the impacts of this technology are becoming clearer. However, much of the dialog has been limited to high-level discussion around general intra-institutional impacts, and lacks the nuance required to provide helpful guidance to RSE practitioners in research settings, specifically. Surprisingly, many RSEs are not involved in career discussions on what the rise of AI means for their professions.

During this BoF, we will hold a structured, interactive discussion session with the goal of identifying critical areas of engagement with AI in the workplace including: current use of AI, AI assistance and automation, AI skills and workforce development, AI and open science, and AI futures. This BoF will represent the first of a series of discussions held jointly by the Academic Data Science Alliance and the US Research Software Engineer Association over the coming year, with support from Schmidt Sciences. The insights gathered from these sessions will inform the development of guidance resources on these topic areas for the broader RSE and computational data practitioner communities.