A guest blog post from Joe Allen from UKDS who, as part of a five-part mini series, gets us thinking about the challenges and ethical implications of using Twitter data.

A Safepod has now been installed in the University Library allowing researchers to meet security requirements whilst working with highly restricted data, confidential or personal information.

Want to find out more about using Twitter for Researchers? Joseph Allen from the School of Social Science has put together a short video lecture.

Are you a researcher that needs to access a large dataset? Are you working off-campus and are struggling to run analysis on data that is stored on-campus? Find out how Research IT can help.

When faced with a large dataset from UK Biobank, Alex Casson’s research group needed an easy and quick way to process it. Christopher Beach explains how they tackled this issue with some help from Research IT.

If your research involves restricted data you may feel that your computational choices are reduced. Gary Leeming, Project Design Lead for Research Lifecycle Programme Project S "Develop a service to manage restricted data", discusses what the University is doing to open up more options.

Research IT will be supporting a new 3D, large-scale visualisation facility in The Alliance Manchester Business School. Not only will we be supplying our expertise by supporting the facility, but we will also be working to integrate it with the rest of the computational infrastructure at the University.

The UK BioBank has now released an update to the full-release 500,000 participant data released last year. Specifically, updated imputed data (study id EGAD00010001474) is now available for use on the CSF, iCSF, DPSF and desktops.

The university has recently announced a 5 year partnership with BBC Research and Development and seven other UK Universities to unlock the potential of data in the media. We are pleased to say that Research IT staff will be using their expertise in several areas of this important project.

Have you heard of Software Carpentry (SWC) and Data Carpentry (DC)? Both organisations have the aim of upskilling researchers so they can upgrade their computational and programming skills and their data analysis skills respectively through a series of workshops and “train the trainer” events.

We are pleased to announce that the UK BioBank Genotyping and Imputation Data Release (data for all 500,000 participants in UK BioBank) is now available for use on central compute platforms (the CSF, DPSF and iCSF). It is also available as a storage share that can be mapped as a network drive on campus PCs / desktops.

Registration is now open for this year's Advances in Data Science 2017 conference. The event is a two-day meeting to present recent developments in data science, with a focus on advanced analytics (machine learning, Bayesian statistics, scalable algorithms), privacy, visualisation, software and diverse applications. Speakers include leading data scientists from industry and academia.