---------- Subject: AI Regulation in the EU – challenges and latest developments Start: Wednesday, 24 May 2023, 13:00 CEST Location: zoom, link in hackmd: Description: The EU institutions are currently preparing a regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is a complex process: The continuous and rapid technological development makes it difficult to stay on track – the law is always behind the technology. This presentation will outline the latest developments on the path to regulating AI and point out critical aspects. The event will include a 20-30 minute talk, followed by informal discussion. ---------- Subject: What a Research Software Engineering group at a Nordic university looks like Start: Wednesday, 05 April 2023, 13:00 CEST Location: zoom, link in hackmd: Description: What does a Research Software Engineering (RSE) group at a Nordic university look like? Aalto RSE supports the whole university, and Richard Darst and other Aalto RSE members will discuss the history behind their team, the way it works, future prospects, and lessons for others. This talk will focus on the administrative side of things, and discussion will focus on what one should know to reproduce this work at other universities. Aalto University is the leading technical university in Finland. Started in 2020, Aalto RSE now serves the entire university in computing, data, and software problems. They work as part of Science-IT, which is effectively the local "HPC team". They have good connections to the local IT Services, Data Agents, and other research services. ---------- Subject: Chapel: Making Parallel Programming Productive, from laptops to supercomputers Start: Wednesday, 30 November 2022, 16:00 CET Location: zoom, link in hackmd: Description: Over the past few decades, a gulf has existed between mainstream programming languages—like Python, Java, C++, Rust, or Swift—and technologies used in practice for programming supercomputers—like MPI, OpenSHMEM, OpenMP, CUDA, OpenCL, or OpenACC. This gulf results in making High Performance Computing something of a specialized skill that may not be readily available to the general programmer or applied computational scientist. In some ways, the problem has even gotten worse over time, as the end of Moore's law has led to building supercomputers using manycore processors and computational accelerators like GPUs. In this talk, I will introduce [Chapel](https://chapel-lang.org/), an open-source language created to bridge this gulf. Chapel strives to support code that is similarly readable/writeable as Python, yet without sacrificing the portability and scalable performance required to utilize supercomputers effectively. Specifically, I will provide motivation for Chapel, present some of its unique features and themes, introduce flagship applications of Chapel, and give a glimpse into our team's current priorities.