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 next Research IT club will take place on the 21^st Feb and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT helped to improve the treatment of cancer patients in early clinical trials and the introduction of a new service to make research data sharing easier.

Have you heard of Data Carpentry workshops? They are aimed at researchers who have little to no prior computational experience and provide the fundamental data skills needed to conduct the full life cycle of data-driven research. The UoM Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research is currently preparing carpentry materials for the Social Sciences.

A new policy has been announced on Research Data Storage which affects all researchers. The University very strongly discourages the use of local storage devices (e.g. USB disks) and "in-house" data storage platforms (e.g. local NAS servers), otherwise known as “point storage solutions”.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 29th Nov, slightly earlier so as to avoid clashing with Christmas festivities! It will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT helped to improve the comparison, annotation and mark-up of a collection of scans and the introduction of a new data service for users of NHS data. To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in!

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.

Research IT have downloaded the UK BioBank Genotyping and Imputation Data Release (data for all 500,000 participants in UK Biobank) but we are currently awaiting the decryption keys from the UK BioBank. The keys are expected to be released at the end of June 2017 and we will make the dataset available to researchers as soon as possible after this.

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

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.