来源：《自然》
原文刊登日期：2022年7月13日
See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there’s no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel.
看看这听起来是否熟悉：你构建了一个软件来解决一个研究问题。但是当你进入下一个项目时，没有人来维护它。随着它的老化，它变得过时，下一个解决类似问题的学者发现自己不得不重新发明轮子。
That’s what happened with WaterDetect, a tool for identifying water in satellite images. Mauricio Cordeiro, a geospatial data scientist and programmer at the Laboratoire Géosciences Environnement Toulouse in France, revived the moribund software at the start of his doctoral project, spending some four to six months getting it to work. Now in the final year of his PhD, Cordeiro still devotes considerable energy to the program. But after he graduates, he says he won’t have time to address issues that arise, and there is no one at his laboratory who can take on the project for him. “The problem continues,” he says.
这就是WaterDetect所发生的事情，这是一种用于识别卫星图像中的水的工具。Cordeiro是法国图卢兹Géosciences环境实验室的一名地理空间数据科学家和程序员，在他的博士项目开始时，他用了大约4到6个月的时间让这个奄奄一息的软件恢复工作。现在是他博士学位的最后一年，Cordeiro仍然在这个项目上投入了大量的精力。但他说，毕业后，他没有时间来解决出现的问题，他的实验室里也没有人可以替他承担这个项目。“问题还在继续，”他说。
Now, a funding initiative hopes to help ease that burden. In January, Schmidt Futures, a science and technology-focused philanthropic organization founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, launched the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS), a network of centres across four universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Each institution will hire around five or six engineers, says Stuart Feldman, Schmidt Futures’ chief scientist, with funding typically running for five years and being reviewed annually. Overall, Schmidt Futures is putting US$40 million into the project, making it among the largest philanthropic investments in this area.
现在，一项资助计划有望帮助减轻这种负担。今年1月，由谷歌前CEO埃里克·施密特创立的以科学技术为重点的慈善组织施密特未来成立了科学软件虚拟研究所(VISS)，这是一个横跨美国和英国四所大学的中心网络。施密特未来公司首席科学家费尔德曼说，每个大学将聘用大约五到六名工程师，资金通常持续五年，每年进行评估。施密特未来公司在该项目中总共投入了4000万美元，使其成为该领域最大的慈善投资之一。
The aim is to overcome a culture of relative neglect in academia for open-source scientific software, Feldman says, adding that support for software engineering is “a line item, just like fuel” at organizations such as NASA. “It’s only in the university research lab environment where this is subsidiary,” he says.
费尔德曼说，这样做的目的是要克服学术界对开源科学软件相对忽视的文化，并补充说，在NASA等组织中，对软件工程的支持是“一个项目，就像燃料一样”。“只有在大学的研究实验室环境中，软件才是次要的，”他说。
The institute will initially fund projects at the University of Cambridge, the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. It’s still early days, but several software projects are already lined up for support, Feldman says. One involves a data-management system to provide researchers and policymakers with access to confidential government data; another will analyse data from a proposed radio telescope.
VISS最初将资助剑桥大学、华盛顿大学、约翰霍普金斯大学以及佐治亚理工学院的项目。费尔德曼说，现在还处于早期阶段，但已经有几个软件项目得到了支持。其中一项涉及数据管理系统，为研究人员和政策制定者提供获取机密政府数据的途径；另一个将分析来自拟建的射电望远镜的数据。