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!

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 (RLP), research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as an interesting use for your Android phone, click on the links below.

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.

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 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.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 5^th of June and will feature updates from our research infrastructure and software engineering teams. Our two feature presentations will look at how Research IT is helping to create new parallel computer architecture inspired by the human brain. There will also be a presentation from IT Services on the planned changes to staff and cluster desktops across the university.

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.