The Call for Submissions for WSSSPE4 is now open. The event will be held at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester 12th – 14th September 2016.

Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of research software at all levels. It is now critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, maintenance, and sustainability of open-use research software: the software upon which specific research results rely. Open-use software means that the software is widely accessible (whether open source, shareware, or commercial). Research software means that the choice of software is essential to specific research results; using different software could produce different results.

The next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club will take place on the 14^th of July and will feature a keynote presentation from Peter Smyth from the UK Data Service on their Hadoop system entitled “The challenges of building and populating a secure but accessible big data environment for researchers in the Social Sciences and related disciplines.”. This meeting will focus on the use of Hadoop across the university and will feature presentations from UoM researchers.

New School of Computer Science seminar has been announced:

Date & Location: 14th June 2016 at 11.00 in Kilburn 2.19

Speaker: Dr Todd Vision. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Host: Mary McDerby

Abstract:

Research data supporting scientific publications have a stewardship gap. Much research data is still unavailable for validation and reuse because researchers consider the costs of archiving to outweigh the benefits. To tip the scales in the other direction, learned societies, universities, libraries, publishers, and disciplinary repositories have undertaken a variety of efforts, and the impact of some of these are beginning to be felt.

JASMIN provides the UK and European climate and earth-system science communities with an efficient data analysis environment. Many datasets, particularly model data, are too big to be easily shipped around: JASMIN enables scientists to bring their processing to the data.

The JASMIN environmental data analysis service (http://www.jasmin.ac.uk/) will be hosting a free conference on Monday, 27 June 2016 to Tuesday, 28 June 2016 in Didcot, Oxfordshire and are inviting new and current users of the service. The service is free to academic users and the conference is a great way to learn more about this data analysis service and how this can help you in your research.

Do you use maps, mapping technologies and/or methods in your research? Would you like to develop your research in this area?

The Geography Department, Digital Humanities@Manchester, Methods@manchester and the John Rylands Library are running a joint workshop on Monday 13th June to identify researcher needs in this area across the Faculty of Humanities.

And be in with a chance of winning £250, £150 or £100 of Amazon Vouchers!

The demand for visualization of datasets through the creation of meaningful and attractive representations of data, and to provide insight and greater understanding of data is rapidly growing. There are many existing applications, ranging from Excel to more sophisticated and complex software like Matlab, Python, R, Mathematica, and STATA.

From feedback, we have identified a need for an application that falls in between these two extremes and we would like your help in evaluating potential applications. This evaluation will help select an application for wider adoption across the University, along with training, support and central licensing.

We have selected Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and IBM Watson Analytics for a more detailed evaluation by the community.

Dr. Wadud Miah from The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) will be running a Fortran Modernisation Workshop at STFC on 27^th-28^th October 2016. It is a completely free event and is open to non-STFC attendees.

This two day computational science-centric practical hands on workshop is aimed at Fortran programmers who want to write modern code, or modernise existing codes, to make it more readable and maintainable by encouraging good software engineering practices. Adopting good software practices makes codes more amenable to optimization and parallelisation, and the path to making it a community code a whole lot easier.

Earlier this year Research IT requested feedback on a proposal to implement a ‘core research application suite’ that would focus support, training and licence resources on a selected suite of applications chosen to offer maximum value to University researchers.

Many thanks to all of you who took the time to contribute to this review, your input was very valuable. Based upon the feedback received it is clear that there is demand for the implementation of a general data visualisation tool (e.g. Spotfire, Tableau) and we are now proceeding with an evaluation of a set of candidate tools with the objective of selecting and deploying such a tool later this year.

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There will be a Drishti workshop on volume visualisation and analysis which will take place on 13 June 2016 (9:30 start in the visualisation suite in HMXIF at Manchester). This will be a practical workshop so attendees will cover how to convert tomography data into Drishti format, process and export it to the interactive software for display on a touchscreen.

The Data-Processing Shared Facility (DPSF) is now available to early-adopters. The DPSF is a new computational platform (developed from Hydra) which is complementary to the highly-successful Computational Shared Facility (CSF) which has been in production for several years: The DPSF is specified for high-memory and IO-intensive work.

For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.