We have provided an Edge Compute service for some time now but what does it actually do? Discover how we provide bespoke hardware and expertise to the National X-ray Computed Tomography Research Facility.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) was an EU Flagship project that started in 2013 with the aim of establishing a research computing infrastructure to enable advancements in the fields of neuroscience, computing, and medicine. This involved work across several computing systems in Europe, including the SpiNNaker hardware at the University of Manchester, which had been under development for a number of years before that.

With ever more data being produced, can we store it efficiently? Research Software Engineer (RSE), Oliver Woolland, has been supporting a team to develop Baler, a Machine Learning tool for compressing scientific and engineering data.

Several of our Research Software Engineers are co-authors on a recent Nature Scientific Reports paper which found that people living in urban areas have worse hay fever symptoms than those living in the countryside.

CORONET, a tool created by our Research Software Engineers (RSEs), has recently been featured in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (JCO): Clinical Cancer Informatics. Find out more about the paper’s findings which explain how the Machine Learning model was created and presented to the healthcare community.

The Metaverse, virtual environments which users can explore and interact with, is beginning to be applied to engineering challenges. Can the Nvidia Omniverse help accelerate Fusion Energy research? Oliver Woolland, Research Software Engineer (RSE), has supported a team leading an investigation, bringing advanced scientific and engineering tools to the Metaverse.

A tool created in conjunction with the Digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team to support decisions regarding hospital admissions or discharge in cancer patients presenting with symptoms of COVID-19 has been selected for a NIHR Clinical Research Network award.

Ann Gledson, Research Software Engineer, is working with researchers from Computer Science and the Alan Turing Institute to investigate the relationship between hay fever and air quality.

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.

In January 2021, our Research Software Engineers worked with the Digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team (dECMT) to create a tool to support decisions regarding hospital admissions or discharge in cancer patients presenting with symptoms of COVID-19. The tool has been so successful that multiple improvements are now planned.

Cancer patients are at increased risk of severe COVID-19. Decision-making tools for hospital admission, severity prediction and increased monitoring for early intervention are critical. The objective of this project was to identify features of COVID-19 in cancer patients predicting severe disease and build a decision-support online tool - COVID-19 Risk in Oncology Evaluation Tool (CORONET).