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

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.

The HPC Short Courses Consortium Fifth Autumn Academy for High Performance Computing (HPC) will be held at the University of Cambridge from the 12^th to 23^rd September.

It’s an intensive two-week course designed to train researchers to start modifying and developing effective and efficient code for applications in HPC. It is suitable for any researcher who has some familiarity with programming and would like to start modifying and/or writing code for use on mid and high performance computer resources.

The Hartree Centre is pleased to announce a sixth programme of access to its Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor cluster.

This is for projects from academia and industry that would like to experiment with their code on this exciting new architecture.

The sixth phase covers the period between Monday 25^th July and Friday 21^st October 2016.

Research IT will be running a new full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on Wednesday 6th July 2016.

The course is aimed at those who have no or little experience of version control. It will cover:

• What version control is;
• The main benefits of using version control;
• How to set up and work with a local repository;
• How to work with remote repositories using GitHub;
• Topics such as branching, resolving conflicts, merging and rebasing;
• Working collaboratively on one repository.

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) will be running the Research Data Visualisation Workshop on July 28th, 2016 at the University of Manchester. If you create data visualisations and plan to visualise new data sets or would like to know about data visualisation toolings and uses then this is the workshop for you.

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 14th 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.