It may be the summer holidays but we are still here to help! We have a couple of drop-in sessions taking place so you can turn up with no appointment to ask any questions or about research IT services including how to include Research IT services in your grant bid proposals and how to cost for research outputs such as websites, code sharing, database distribution etc.

A new member of the Research IT team, Ann Gledson, presented a paper at the IEEE SmartCity-2018 conference, demonstrating the use of a smart city dashboard for combining and analysing multi-source data.

Research IT will soon be helping Oscar Seip from Italian Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures to recreate a 3D prototype model of a 16th century theatre supposedly built for the King of France, Francis I. There has been some debate whether this theatre had in fact been a ‘real’ theatre but Oscar has discovered new evidence which suggests that it did actually exist.

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 research infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as a fantastic example of our research software engineers in action, click on the links below.

The Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) scoping phase is drawing to a conclusion. Over the past six months there has been an intense period of consultation with the research and support community staff through workshops, one to one interviews, deep dives, and a Thought Exchange survey. The Thought Exchange provided us with a comprehensive insight of the ideas of the community from PhD students to professors and support staff of how they envisage future e-infrastructure data management and support.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers which need to be costed for in research grant proposals. From research software expertise to research sysadmins to research data storage and production of research websites – come along to our clinic on the 21st of June to find out more!

The next Research IT club will take place on the 5^th of June and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT is helping to create new parallel computer architecture inspired by the human brain. There will also be a presentation from IT Services on the planned changes to staff and cluster desktops across the university.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the University’s Research IT group, students and citizens in Saint Petersburg will now have access to a Russian version of LinguaSnapp - The University of Manchester’s mobile app for documenting language landscapes.

The call is now out for the annual end-of-financial-year CSF (Central Shared Facility) procurement. If your research group has funds and wishes to make a contribution, this University financial year, to the CSF, please get in touch as soon as possible.

The Research Data Gateway is a new service to increase the visibility of research data that you have shared. Most research funders, and an increasing number of journals, require researchers to share the data which underlies papers and this service will help you gain the maximum impact from doing this.

Bring your lunch on Thursday 17^th May, 12:00 -13:00 Zochonis B22 and meet fellow R users on campus, while listening to this month’s presenters, David Buil-Gil (PhD student and Teaching Assistant in Criminology at University of Manchester) and Angelo Moretti (Research Associate in small area estimation in the Department of Geography at University of Sheffield) talk about Small Area Estimation in R.

The popular Computational Shared Facility (CSF) has recently hit a significant milestone with the 1-millionth job being submitted.