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.

The presentations from the first meeting of the Research IT club are now available online. They include an introduction to Research IT and research infrastructure, a presentation on how Research IT have helped to speed up proteomics research and an overview of the new Dropbox for Business service.

We have recently welcomed two new members of staff to the Research IT team. Jim McGrath and David Mawdsley have both joined as Research Software Engineers.

Robert Haines from Research IT recently attended the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 'Engineering Academic Software', co-organised by the Software Sustainability Institute's Manchester PI Carole Goble. The primary topics of discussion at the workshop were how to build the research software of the future and how to get credit for doing so.

The second meeting of the University of Manchester R user group (R.U.M) will take place on the 5th December, at 11:00am-12pm in Vaughan House. Paul Johnston from Research IT will be presenting on ‘Text mining in R’ and Heather Robinson from Health e-Research Centre (HeRC) will discuss ‘Enhancing your research with public datasets- an introduction to WORLDCLIM’. The session will be followed by a R clinic for troubleshooting problem code.

NAG (The Numerical Algorithms Group) are running a training session on how to make the most of their numerical and statistical routines within MATLAB. The NAG Library, and Fortran Compiler, are available to University of Manchester staff and students for use on both institutional and personal machines for academic use under a site-wide license.

Computing Insight UK 2016 (CIUK) will take place in Manchester this year allowing for networking between users / researchers/ vendors and sales for various HPC architectures. There is also a full day of presentations where Martin Turner from Research IT will be presenting on 'Building a bespoke system for combined HPC and 3D Visualisation.

Research IT has arranged for the latest version of Git (v.2.10.2) to be available on all staff managed desktops. Git is a version control system that allows software developers to have complete control and management of their code development ensuring that you can easily revert back to previous versions, share your code and collaborate with others.

Wolfram will be on campus on the 22^nd of November to introduce Mathematica v11, their powerful technical computing platform. The University has acquired unlimited licenses for this system which allows users to perform data analysis, text and language processing, geographic data visualisation and more. In addition Mathematica also provides neural networks, machine learning possibilities and audio, image and signal processing capabilities.

The Data Science Institute invites submissions for proposals with the potential to develop successful interdisciplinary data science activities at The University of Manchester. Joint applications from researchers developing collaborations across different disciplines are encouraged.

Two Avizo courses will take place in the Photon Science Institute (PSI) at the university in December. An introductory course will take place on the 6^th followed by an advanced course on the 7th. The courses are free to students / members of staff at the University of Manchester but external attendees will be charged.

Registration has now closed for these training events.

Two members of Research IT are co-authors on a recently published paper in BMC Ecology. The paper describes the development and implementation of "BioVeL" - a virtual laboratory for data analysis and modelling in biodiversity science and ecology.