Ann Gledson, Research Software Engineer, is part of a cross-university team that recently won a University of Manchester “Making a Difference” award for the Manchester Urban Observatory.

Back in 2019, two Research Software Engineers (RSEs) were co-authors on a paper which aimed to motivate users to reflect on their search behaviour, and to experiment with different search functionalities. This work has now been extended using data mining.

Two of our Research Software Engineers have been working with the University eScience Lab on a BioExcel project to develop Conda packages for GROMACS making it easier for researchers to set up and run the software and to increase its reproducibility from computational workflow systems.

Find out how our Research Software Engineers have been working with researchers from Computer Science to bring coding to the next generation.

Research Software Engineer (RSE) Patricia Barnby and Mobile Development Service (MDS) lead Adrian Harwood were recently guest panellists on the popular Society of Research Software Engineering webinar series where they discussed how RSE groups handle the growing demand for mobile apps from researchers.

Twitter has just announced a new programme to allow researchers to interact with Twitter to extract data for research purposes. In this blog Peter Crowther, a Research Software Engineer in Research IT, gives an introduction to interacting with Twitter programmatically and what these latest changes mean for researchers.

Douglas Lowe and Ann Gledson, Research Software Engineers from Research IT, recently presented an online poster updating on the work they have been doing for an Alan Turing Institute funded project led by David Topping (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences) and Caroline Jay (School of Computer Science).

Microsoft have recently launched a new community for Research Software Engineers (RSEs), Data Scientists, Data Stewards and System Administrators.

Veselin Karaganev, a Computer Science summer student from the University has been working with our Research Software Engineers to develop a web database for the basement membraneBASE project from Wellcome Centre for Cell-Matrix Research.

There is a prestigious 5-year Research Software Engineering Fellowship call announced with first round deadline on 18 August 2020.

Andrew Jerrison, Research Software Engineer, explains how he worked with researchers led by Prof. Gareth Evans from Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, to develop a software application to collect and collate data that allows them to give women a personalised risk assessment of breast cancer at their normal screening session.

Find out how Research IT research software engineers are playing a key role in SpiNNaker, part of the Human Brain project.

Virtual Environments are a tool for isolating and tracking the software packages that you use for your work. Why is this useful to you? Let Research Software Engineers Douglas Lowe and Ann Gledson explain!

As part of the BBC Data Partnership, Joshua Woodcock, a Research Software Engineer in Research IT, developed the Interaction Data Visualisation Tool, (IDVT); a web-based data visualisation tool for the initial analysis of low-level interaction data taken from object-based user experiences.

The first Research IT club of 2020 takes place next month on the 12

th

of Feb. Come along to see our services in action through researcher presentations and to hear the latest research IT news. The February event sees Velson Horie from Manchester Museum describe online image comparison software and accompanying website produced for him by Research IT. Register now to attend on the 12th.

Two of our Research Software Engineers (RSEs) are named on a recently published paper aiming to motivate users to reflect on their search behaviour, and to experiment with different search functionalities.

Research IT have recently collaborated with Dr. Mabel Sánchez Barrioluengo in the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) to make a large patent information database easily available to researchers in AMBS and across the University.

Research IT's drop-in sessions are just one of our many ways of reaching out to researchers across the University. We get some very interesting requests at our sessions and this is a great example of how our Research Software Engineers (RSEs) were able to help out.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the first Research IT club of the academic year. If you were unable to attend, all the presentations are now available at the links below. We had some great presentations on how our RSEs built a searchable database for Alzheimer’s Research and the first case study of our Cloud bursting in action.

Ian Hinder, Research Software Engineer (RSE) from Research IT recently attended a GPU Hackathon at the University of Sheffield. In this blog post he explains the outcomes of the event and the benefits of having research software engineers involved in research projects.

Like several of the services offered by Research IT, mobile application development by our team of skilled Research Software Engineers (RSEs) should be costed into your grant application before it is submitted.

Researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester have been helping local authorities across the UK plan their carbon emissions reduction strategies with a little help from Research IT.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the last Research IT club of the current academic year. If you were unable to attend, all the presentations are now available at the links below. There are updates from Research IT as well as the presentations on improving code to improve probabilistic treatment planning for cancer and free of charge performance optimisation and productivity services for your academic and industrial code.

Come along to the Research IT Club on the 4th of June and find out how our Research Software Engineering team is helping UoM researchers to improve radiation treatment in cancer therapy. There will also be updates on the latest computational procurement and the latest news from across Research IT.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will soon put out a call for applications for open source software projects that are essential to biomedical research. Applicants can request funding between $50k and $250k for one year. If you are interested in applying then please get in touch!

There was a bumper turn out at the April Research IT club which focused on our new mobile applications development service. There were many new faces and a lot of questions about how the service will run, how the collected data will be stored etc. If you were unable to make the club you can catch up now on the presentations at the links below.

Come along to the Research IT club on the 4th of April to find out more about our new mobile application development service. If you want to use mobile apps in your research or are interested in having an app developed as part of a research grant application, then this is the Research IT Club for you!

The Institute of Coding (IoC) is a Government initiative involving universities, industry and professionals which aims to address the UK digital skills shortage. One of the key aims of the project is to improve the quality and relevance of digital skills education delivered by UK universities.

A study of the differences between healthy brains and those with Alzheimer’s Disease has produced largest dataset of its type ever. And, thanks to Phil Bradbury, Research Software Engineer (RSE) in Research IT, the dataset is now freely available online for any scientist to use.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the Christmas Research IT Club and to those who took the opportunity to ask questions! If you were unable to attend all the presentations are now available at the links below. There are updates on research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as the presentations from our guest speakers - Dr Antony Payton from the Division of Informatics, Imaging & Data Sciences and Malcolm Whitehouse, CIO IT Services.

One of our Senior Research Software Engineers (RSE), Andrew Rowley, recently helped to develop software for and launch SpiNNaker, a machine with million cores.

Imagine if you could gather data from thousands of mobile data points reacting to the environment around them? That's what our Research Software Engineers have been helping to do and in more than one language thanks to an international collaboration!

Come and work for Research IT! We are looking for two permanent Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and/or Data Scientists to join our friendly, diverse team. We work on a huge variety of projects (long and short) across all Faculties and Institutes across the University, collaborating with academics and researchers of all disciplines.

It may be the summer but our team is as busy as ever! David Mawdsley (Research Software Engineer) is putting together a new workshop on Shiny. This is an R package that makes it easy to make interactive web apps using R.

Research IT will soon be helping Oscar Seip from Italian Studies, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures to recreate a 3D prototype model of a 16th century theatre supposedly built for the King of France, Francis I. There has been some debate whether this theatre had in fact been a ‘real’ theatre but Oscar has discovered new evidence which suggests that it did actually exist.

Thanks to a collaboration between the Multilingual Manchester research unit and the University’s Research IT group, students and citizens in Saint Petersburg will now have access to a Russian version of LinguaSnapp - The University of Manchester’s mobile app for documenting language landscapes.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! To see presentations on the latest news from the Research Lifecycle Programme, research infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as a fantastic example of our research software engineers in action, click on the links below.

Nicolas Gruel, a research software engineer from Research IT has been working with Prof Peter Pormann (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures) to easily compare interpretations and translations of a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works associated with the physician Hippocrates.

One of our research software engineers (RSE), Rob Dunne, has been embedded in a team working to facilitate decision-making for cancer patients who may benefit from experimental treatments in early clinical trials.

We're already looking forward to 2018 here in Research IT with the announcement of our first set of dates for our drop-in sessions.

These sessions are specially designed to help quickly answer any queries, questions or issues you may be having with research IT services including software help, data visualization, research data management, access to HPC resources and much much more.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

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!

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

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.

Researchers in English Linguistics from the School of Arts, Languages and Culture were keen to enhance an existing project website, which allows visitors to view scans and transcriptions of historic documents from the John Rylands collection. A series of enquiries eventually lead them to the Research Software Engineers in Research IT.

BBSRC have partnered with EPSRC and MRC in a call to specifically encourage proposals relevant to “Technology Touching Life” (TTL), a joint initiative to foster interdisciplinary research into innovative and potentially disruptive technological capabilities that will drive world-leading basic discovery research in the life sciences. The call has an indicative total budget up to £3.5 million.

The next Research IT Club will be held on the 25^th October and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at “the role of software engineers in reproducible research” and the introduction of new security controls across the university as part of the Cyber Security Program.

To attend the event please register so we know how much coffee to order in!

Applications are now open for the RSE Cloud Computing Awards program, supported by Microsoft. The goal of the program is to create a community bridging researchers, university stakeholders, regional teams, and national services, to better understand how Microsoft Azure can enable better, faster, and more reproducible research.

The first two awards from the EPSRC USA-UK Research Software Engineer Travel fund have just been announced and Martin Turner from Research IT has been fortunate enough to receive one them. The funding aims to encourage greater collaboration between the UK and USA-based Research Software Engineer communities to help with: investigating emerging hardware and the impact on software; building collaboration around a particular science area; developing common community codes; and building links between computational / computer science and mathematics.

Software is often a critical component of scientific research. It can be part of the academic research methods used to produce research results, or it may be the actual academic research result. Software, however, has rarely been considered to be a citable artefact in its own right. With the advent of open-source software, artefact evaluation committees of conferences, and journals that include source code and running systems as part of the published supporting material, it is expected that software will increasingly be recognized as part of the academic process. It is therefore essential that the quality and sustainability of this software is accounted for.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers such as high performance computing and software consultancy but how do you know if these services are relevant to you and your research? If they are how do you describe them and cost them correctly in your grant proposal?

Come along to the next Research IT Grant Support Clinic on the 22nd of June where researchers and research support staff can discover more about the skills and services that we offer and, importantly, how to include them in grant proposals.

Traditionally the first step in interpreting video is to code it into a form that can be analysed systematically. The coding process is currently performed manually, and it can be slow and difficult, and biased by subjectivity. David Mawdsley (Research IT) recently presented a poster at the first “Advances in Data Science” conference explaining how we are helping Dr Caroline Jay’s group develop a way to quickly code human behaviours allowing the rapid analysis of hours of video.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! The presentations are now available from the links below.

EPSRC has announced a call to support Research Software Engineer (RSE) Fellowships for a period of up to 5 years. The Fellowships are open to exceptional individuals in the software field who demonstrate leadership and have combined expertise in programming and a solid knowledge of the research environment.

If you are wondering where the term “Research Software Engineer (RSE)” came from then a new report could help to explain. The first State of the Nation Report for Research Software Engineers provides a history of the RSE campaign and a snapshot of the RSE community as it stands today.

Research IT offers a range of services to UoM researchers such as high performance computing and software consultancy but how do you know if these services are relevant to you and your research? If they are how do you describe them and cost them correctly in your grant proposal?

Have you ever wondered if your shopping habits could be influenced? Do you buy the same groceries every week? Would extra information allow you to make informed choices when you do your online shop? Research IT helped a group of researchers who were trying to see if they could make consumers change their mind.

Following the success of the First Conference of Research Software Engineers, the Second Conference will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester on the 7th-8th September 2017. The event will feature a lively, international mix of over 200 attendees and the call has now been issued for talks, posters, workshops and tutorials.

Research IT are launching a new series of sessions where you can discover more about Research IT, the skills and services that we offer and, importantly, how to include them in your grant proposals.

Jisc, in collaboration with The University of Sheffield, have organised a free workshop for all researchers interested and passionate about developing or using research software.

The organisers want to collate common problems and share experiences around managing and sharing software, as well as developing new solutions. There will be experts on hand to answer any questions and inform participants of available resources.

Are you wondering what an Research Software Engineer (RSE) is? When did the term first start being used or if you are one? Find out more in a brief history of RSEs from Simon Hettrick, Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute.

The Collaborations Workshop 2017 (CW17) is the Software Sustainability Institute’s research software event of 2017. It brings together key members of the research software community to present, discuss, build, make, network and explore key and current areas of the research software landscape. Many RSE groups will have representatives attending.

A mobile phone app developed by Research IT has been hitting the headlines recently. Featured on ITV news and Granada Reports as well as in The Daily Mirror, the Manchester Evening News and local newspapers across the region, Linguasnapp is enabling researchers to identify the range of languages used in Manchester.

Our Research software engineers (RSEs) are helping researchers in the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research launch a tool for sharing best practice in study design and management. The Extant Study Catalogue will allow researchers at Manchester and further afield to share details of their study design, datasets and coding practices, with a view to developing a shared data dictionary that can be used to make studies more easily comparable.

We have recently welcomed two new members of staff to the Research IT team. Jim McGrath and David Mawdsley have both joined as Research Software Engineers.

Robert Haines from Research IT recently attended the Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 'Engineering Academic Software', co-organised by the Software Sustainability Institute's Manchester PI Carole Goble. The primary topics of discussion at the workshop were how to build the research software of the future and how to get credit for doing so.

From November, Research IT will be holding Drop-in sessions in different locations around campus. There is no booking required, just drop by to have a chat about any research-related IT problems you may have.

LinguaSnapp is a project to create multilingual landscape maps of cities round the world by crowdsourcing data from the public. Last year Research IT created a mobile app and web application for the project to focus on the city of Manchester.

Are you one of a growing number of people in academia who combine expertise in programming with an intricate understanding of research? If so then you are a research software engineer (RSE)! The inaugural conference of RSEs took place in Manchester in early September and the presentations are now available online along with many of the workshop training materials.

Research IT has been providing the SpiNNaker project with research software engineer (RSE) expertise to help them simulate billions of simple neurons in order to create brain inspired computing systems.

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.

Do you develop research software?

The inaugural conference of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) will be held at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK on 15-16 September 2016. The event will target research software developers and research software engineers at any stage in their career.