Imagine if you could gather data from thousands of mobile data points reacting to the environment around them? That's what our Research Software Engineers have been helping to do and in more than one language thanks to an international collaboration!

Come along to the Research IT club in December to find out more about all the large research IT infrastructure procurements that are coming soon as well as the use of HTC Vive Pro in VR teaching. There will also be a presentation from Malcolm Whitehouse, CIO of IT Services about his vision for a digital university.

There is a lot of activity in Research IT regarding investment in research IT infrastructure and the Research Lifecycle Programme. It can all get a bit confusing! We have put together a summary of the current position regarding investment and workshop outcomes which we hope you will find useful.

On the 15th of November we held the first meeting of the UoM UK Biobank Community. There was a great turnout and everyone took the opportunity to ask questions of our speakers, including us! Thank you to everyone who attended, the presentations are now available below.

Due to the Christmas holidays we have decided to postpone this event until the New Year. The next Research IT Costing Clinic will take place on the 21st of Feb 2019. Subscribe to our newsletter to know when registration is open!

Join fellow R users at the next meeting of the University of Manchester R user group on Wednesday 28th November from 12:00 -13:00 at University Place room no 3.205. Come along, bring your lunch, and meet R users from across the university.

Girish Ramesh from the Textiles and Apparel Group in the School of Materials was one of the first users of our prototype Visualization and Data Analysis Laboratory (vDAL). He used the powerful machines to visualise hair as part of his PhD and also as part of the prestigious Google Summer of Code.

As part of the Data Science Research Partnership between BBC R&D and the University of Manchester, one of our research software engineers (RSE), Josh Woodcock, spent 3 months working with BBC R&D to develop a way to visualise click data from an internal trial of the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience (CAKE). Involved in the project were Jonathan Carlton (PhD student with BBC R&D and University of Manchester), Andy Brown (BBC R&D), John Keane and Caroline Jay (University of Manchester).

We recently set up a mailing list for UoM UK Biobank users to connect with other UoM UK-Biobank users, ask questions and keep up to date with the community at the University. We would now like to invite UoM UK Biobank users and potential users to what we hope is the first of several events for our local community.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) we are looking at procurement processes alongside HPC provision. We know that many researchers at the University are already using Cloud provision and that many more would like to do so. However at the moment there is no official process in place to procure or access Cloud resources.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! To see presentations on the latest news from the research lifecycle programme (RLP), research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as an interesting use for your Android phone, click on the links below.

We have just announced a new course – Introduction to Mathematica, which is available now for booking to all research staff and PGRs. Remember that all our courses are free to University of Manchester staff and PGRs!