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 12th 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.

This month we have a bumper collection of top tips from our Research Software Engineers (RSEs)! They are passing on a selection of good practice tips which they advise all researchers who develop or write software, to consider adopting.

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.

If you, as a researcher, are thinking of requesting help from our team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs), you may want to know what skills they have. By 'skills' we mean everything from programming languages through specification, methods and testing (to name just some). Ian Cottam describes how we've made it easy to find 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.

At Research IT we know how busy researchers are, and how talking face to face can be the easiest way to communicate a problem or complex research idea. That's why every other Wednesday in term-time we host drop-in sessions across across campus so you can talk to our experts in person about anything research computing related.

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.