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.