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 15th – 16th 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.

The Software Sustainability Institute’s Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop brings together researchers, developers and educators to explore best practices when using containers and the future of research software with containers. The Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop (C4RR) will take place on 27th - 28th June 2017 at Cambridge.

The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshops series bring together researchers, developers, innovators, managers, funders, publishers, leaders and educators to explore best practices and the future of research software. Collaboration Workshop 17 (CW17) will take place on the 27th - 29th Mar 2017 at the Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds.

Within Research IT the Research Infrastructure team has a wealth of experience in building and supporting computational platforms, storage, VMs, Web servers and a wide variety of custom, local infrastructure for research groups.

Research IT are launching a new series of sessions where you can discover more about Research IT, the skills and services that we offer and, importantly, how to include them in your grant proposals.

In the last few years members of Research IT have been helping in the campaign for the Research Councils to directly recognise and fund career paths via fellowships within a Research Software Engineering (RSE) role.