A support group, Statsclinic, has been created by a group of statisticians from the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health. Led by Dr Paraskevi Pericleous, the group run regular drop-in sessions for researchers from across the university who have stats problems. The drop-in sessions are the 4th Wednesday of every month. The next session will be on the 25th Jan at 14:00-15:00 in room 4.24 in Ellen Wilkinson Building (please arrive within the first 15 mins).

Do you use Avizo, the 3D visualization and analysis software for scientific and industrial data? Research staff from the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility in the School of Materials are now running two drop in sessions per week.

Jisc, in collaboration with The University of Sheffield, have organised a free workshop for all researchers interested and passionate about developing or using research software.

The organisers want to collate common problems and share experiences around managing and sharing software, as well as developing new solutions. There will be experts on hand to answer any questions and inform participants of available resources.

Our flagship computational facility, The CSF, is currently only available to those researchers contributing funds to the platform. However we are pleased to announce that our recent case to provide limited free-at-the-point-of-use computational resource to users without funds, particularly for those who are not computational specialists, has been successful.

Are you wondering what an Research Software Engineer (RSE) is? When did the term first start being used or if you are one? Find out more in a brief history of RSEs from Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute.

The Collaborations Workshop 2017 (CW17) is the Software Sustainability Institute’s research software event of 2017. It brings together key members of the research software community to present, discuss, build, make, network and explore key and current areas of the research software landscape. Many RSE groups will have representatives attending.

An Avizo Introduction course will be running at the University of Manchester on Thursday, 26th January. Avizo is 3D visualization and analysis software for scientific data.

A mobile phone app developed by Research IT has been hitting the headlines recently. Featured on ITV news and Granada Reports as well as in The Daily Mirror, the Manchester Evening News and local newspapers across the region, Linguasnapp is enabling researchers to identify the range of languages used in Manchester.

The Research Data Storage (Isilon) is being upgraded to a new tiered platform which will offer greater data storage capacity. Preparatory work for the upgrade is underway and this will require Isilon to be unavailable on Saturday 10th December from 6am - 2pm.

Thank you to everyone who came to one of our Drop-in sessions over the last month. It's been great to hear about your projects and see how Research IT might be able to support your research.

There will be a half day course on "Parallel Programming with C++" at the University on the 24th of January 2017. This is a short course that will give you a taste of functional programming in C++ and how it can be used to write efficient parallel code.

Our Research software engineers (RSEs) are helping researchers in the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research launch a tool for sharing best practice in study design and management. The Extant Study Catalogue will allow researchers at Manchester and further afield to share details of their study design, datasets and coding practices, with a view to developing a shared data dictionary that can be used to make studies more easily comparable.