A number of training courses in research IT will take place in September to coincide with the start of term. The courses are open to all University of Manchester researchers (both staff and post grad).

There will be two introductory workshops for working with the maths software Maple and MapleSim (modeling and simulation tool). These workshops will introduce you to a number of teaching and research applications using Maplesoft tools.

The deadline for participation in the evaluation of visualization tools has been extended until the 18th of September 2016. Participants currently have an excellent chance of winning an Amazon voucher worth £250, £150 or £100!

Full details of the simple process to evaluate the software on offer and how to submit your feedback can be found on our visualization blog post.

The Manchester SIAM-IMA Student Chapter is proud to host the first Julia workshop in the UK, taking place on 19-20th September 2016 at the University of Manchester. This two-day workshop consists of six plenary talks and two practical sessions led by core Julia contributors. The workshop aims to explain what Julia is, how to use it and how it is used in areas such as optimisation, natural language processing, statistics, materials science and computational biology.

STFC are lining up an exciting programme of speakers for you at CIUK 2016, ready to highlight the way high performance computing, data-centric and cognitive technologies are accelerating research, boosting business and changing the world around us.

MathWorks are organising webinar to introduce MATLAB, a high-level language and interactive environment for numerical computation, visualization, and programming. The course will take place 2nd August 2016.

MATLAB includes built-in mathematical functions fundamental to solving engineering and scientific problems, and an interactive environment ideal for iterative exploration, design, and problem solving. Through product demonstrations, you will see how this combination allows you to quickly explore ideas, gain insight into your data, and document and share your results.

Please allow approximately 45 minutes to attend the presentation and Q&A session. This webinar will be recorded, so if you can't make it for the live broadcast, register and we will send you a link to watch it on-demand.

For more information and registration please visit the event website.

All staff and researchers are responsible for ensuring that any private data is kept secure, and IT Services can help you do that with your old computer equipment.

Throwing an old hard drive or computer in the bin or leaving it a loading bay, risks exposing confidential information to someone with malicious intentions. It’s usually possible to recover deleted files, and often possible to retrieve information from a faulty hard drive.

The consequences of this can be catastrophic; the University could be fined up to £500,000 for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. There’s also the possibility of confidential research data being exposed, and personal or reputational damage.

Don’t risk it.

If you have any old laptops, computer hard drives, USB drives, DVDs or even dusty old floppy disks to dispose of, bring them to B29 Pariser Building or the Kilburn Building IT Support Centre, where all the data will be securely deleted and processed appropriately.

You can can even bring old keyboards, mice and other small peripherals, but please speak to a colleague in the IT Support Centre first if you need to dispose of larger items such as desktop PCs, monitors or printers, as they may need to collect these from you.

Find out more:

• IT Services: Disposal and re-use of equipment
• IT Services: help and support

Note for staff and researchers in labs: If your IT equipment is currently in a lab which requires decontamination before disposal, please ensure this takes place before you remove it.

The UK Data Service and Digital Innovation are running an intense all-day hackathon on Saturday 24 September at The Shed at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).

The UK Data Service Open Data Dive aims to bring together coders, data enthusiasts, graphic designers, project managers and pizza lovers into the same room to hunt down, crunch and beautify open social and economic data.

The Open Data Dive is free to attend and open to everyone. Free lunch and drinks will be provided.

Newcomers are welcome and there will be data specialists and programmers from the UK Data Service on hand to provide support and help. During the day, short parallel workshops will run on finding and understanding data, using APIs and big data.

For more information and registration follow the links below.

• Event page
• Registration

Join Wolfram Training for free online training series based on Stephen Wolfram's book An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language. Each session covers different chapters from the book in depth and explores additional examples and exercises. Learn how to perform calculations, manipulate images, analyze real-world data, and even deploy your own cloud apps with the powerful and elegant Wolfram Language. And don't miss out on the opportunity for interactive Q&A with the host, Wolfram Language veteran Dave Withoff.

The next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club will take place on the 14^th of July with registration closing on the 12^th.

Register now to hear about the new University of Manchester Data Science Institute from Prof Magnus Rattray and developments in Data Science at Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMIST) from Prof Rachel Gibson. There is also a keynote presentation from Peter Smyth from the UK Data Service explaining how you can get involved with the UK Data Service’ Hadoop system. This will be followed by a presentation from a local Hadoop user, Mihaly Berekmeri, who will relate his experience of using Hadoop and IBM BigSQL.

This month we say good bye to Kurt Weideling, Head of Research IT who is leaving to take up the position of Director, Information Systems and Digital Services at Manchester Metropolitan University. Since his arrival, Kurt has overseen the re-organisation of Research IT, development of a new governance model as well as putting in place a future strategy and roadmap for Research IT. The Research IT team would like to wish Kurt all the best in his new role.

How should we build the research software of the future? This was the question under consideration at the Dagstuhl Perspective’s Workshop ‘Engineering Academic Software’, co-organised by the Software Sustainability Institute’s Manchester PI Carole Goble. Experts in the area from across the world spent an intensive week presenting, discussing, debating and writing, to define current problems in the field and determine how we could address them.