More than 100 people from all over Switzerland attended this years EnhanceR Symposium which took place on September 4th at HEG-FR in Fribourg.
Summary
The theme, Swiss RSE in Action, attracted research IT professionals and members of the young but growing Swiss Research Software Engineering (RSE) community. It provided an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas and collaborate, with the registration data showing that around 50% of attendees were first-timers.
After a welcome by EnhanceR Assembly President Anusch Bachofner and Champak Beeravolu Reddy from the local organising team, the symposium opened with a well received keynote by Imanol Schlag from the ETH AI Center. His talk, “Building Open-Source, Transparent, and Multilingual Large Language Models in Switzerland,” was especially timely, coming just days after the launch of Apertus, the Swiss LLM model, for which he was one of the main architects. Unsurprisingly, the audience engaged with the speaker by asking many questions, which were unfortunately limited due to the schedule.
In the afternoon, Sylvain Corlay (CEO of QuantStack and co-organiser of PyData Paris) delivered a thought-provoking keynote titled Scaling Jupyter to Millions of Users. He presented recent updates about Jupyterlite and how it can be used to deploy Jupyter notebooks to many users without the need for backend server infrastructure, offering easy access to educational resources at low cost.
A new feature of this year’s symposium was the six workshops that were voluntarily contributed by attendees. These workshops sparked engaging discussions and exchanges:
- Connecting code, data & compute for collaborative research with Renku
- Deploy a FAIR Python application in 30 minutes using Gradio
- Building Communities That Work: A Hands-On Workshop on Fighting Noise in Developer Forums
- RSEs and Data Stewards: Finding Synergies
- Exploring Drug Repurposing for Autoimmune Diseases with DeepLife’s Cell Blueprint
- Understanding the Value of Nix for Stable Development – The Fun Way
The workshops stood out for their diversity—not only in topics, ranging from software tools to community building and biomedical applications, but also in format, from brainstorming and structured discussion to feature demonstrations, data exploration, and hands-on coding.
As in previous years, the symposium featured popular show-and-tell sessions to offer attendees more visibility of their work and projects. Fifteen presentations covered a wide range of topics, including project management, high-performance computing, data management, software engineering and demonstrations of research software.
Equally important were the informal exchanges over coffee and lunch breaks. These moments offered space for participants to connect, share experiences, and spark new collaborative ideas.
We look forward to seeing how these synergies will shape upcoming activities within EnhanceR and the wider RSE network - and to welcoming everyone again at the EnhanceR Symposium 2026!
Slides
The slides from the presentations, workshops and show-and-tell sessions are available here.
Image Gallery
Photos by Niklaus Lang.
