The next Research IT Club will be held on the 10^th of May and will feature a welcome from the new Head of Research IT, Angus Hearmon as well as updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in!

If you are wondering where the term “Research Software Engineer (RSE)” came from then a new report could help to explain. The first State of the Nation Report for Research Software Engineers provides a history of the RSE campaign and a snapshot of the RSE community as it stands today.

PRACE has recently announced its 15^th Call for Proposals for Project Access. The current call provides access to various European Tier 0 systems from Bull, Cray, Lenovo and IBM. These comprise a mixture of standard x86, Knights Landing and GPU platforms. Joint submissions from academia and industry are particularly welcome.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers such as high performance computing and software consultancy but how do you know if these services are relevant to you and your research? If they are how do you describe them and cost them correctly in your grant proposal?

Touchscreens are very popular for research data visualization but any system deployed must work smoothly and intuitively. There are a wide range of systems available - from expensive purpose-built systems for exhibitions to simple tablet/phone software options available for touching and manipulating data. How do you know which one to choose?

Have you ever wondered if your shopping habits could be influenced? Do you buy the same groceries every week? Would extra information allow you to make informed choices when you do your online shop? Research IT helped a group of researchers who were trying to see if they could make consumers change their mind.

Registration is now open for this year's Advances in Data Science 2017 conference. The event is a two-day meeting to present recent developments in data science, with a focus on advanced analytics (machine learning, Bayesian statistics, scalable algorithms), privacy, visualisation, software and diverse applications. Speakers include leading data scientists from industry and academia.

Are you a Social Scientist who works with data? Would you like to learn more about shell, git, data management best practices and data cleaning and R? If so then register now for the Data Carpentry workshop for Social Sciences 30 - 31 March.

Following the success of the First Conference of Research Software Engineers, the Second Conference will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on the 7th-8th September 2017. The event will feature a lively, international mix of over 200 attendees and the call has now been issued for talks, posters, workshops and tutorials.

The University of Manchester Data Science Institute has announced a call for abstracts for their 'Advances in Data Science' Conference to be held on the 15^th – 16^th May.

The conference is a two-day meeting to present recent developments in data science, with a focus on advanced analytics (machine learning, Bayesian statistics, scalable algorithms), privacy, visualisation, software and diverse applications. Speakers include leading data scientists from industry and academia.

Aimed at Social science researchers interested in coding, this workshop organised by the UK Data Service will provide researchers with a basic set of skills which are aimed at making the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.

Dates have been announced for tomography and 3D data images processing courses using Avizo for the next few months at the University of Manchester. The courses are run by the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility (MXIF) at the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility, University of Manchester and are free to UoM researchers. External attendees are welcome to attend but there is a cost.