Research IT is organising a Mathematica Summer Workshop at the University of Manchester on the 27th – 29th of June 2017. This will be an opportunity to bring the regional Mathematica user community together to exchange experiences and showcase research projects and teaching experience involving Mathematica.

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?

The University of Manchester Data Science Institute has announced a call for abstracts for their 'Advances in Data Science' Conference to be held on the 15^th – 16^th May.

The conference is a two-day meeting to present recent developments in data science, with a focus on advanced analytics (machine learning, Bayesian statistics, scalable algorithms), privacy, visualisation, software and diverse applications. Speakers include leading data scientists from industry and academia.

The Software Sustainability Institute’s Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop brings together researchers, developers and educators to explore best practices when using containers and the future of research software with containers. The Docker Containers for Reproducible Research Workshop (C4RR) will take place on 27th - 28th June 2017 at Cambridge.

Do you use Avizo, the 3D visualization and analysis software for scientific and industrial data? Research staff from the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility in the School of Materials are now running two drop in sessions per week.

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.

Computing Insight UK 2016 (CIUK) will take place in Manchester this year allowing for networking between users / researchers/ vendors and sales for various HPC architectures. There is also a full day of presentations where Martin Turner from Research IT will be presenting on 'Building a bespoke system for combined HPC and 3D Visualisation.

Research IT has arranged for the latest version of Git (v.2.10.2) to be available on all staff managed desktops. Git is a version control system that allows software developers to have complete control and management of their code development ensuring that you can easily revert back to previous versions, share your code and collaborate with others.

The deadline for participation in the evaluation of visualization tools has been extended until the 18th of September 2016. Participants currently have an excellent chance of winning an Amazon voucher worth £250, £150 or £100!

Full details of the simple process to evaluate the software on offer and how to submit your feedback can be found on our visualization blog post.

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.

The Call for Submissions for WSSSPE4 is now open. The event will be held at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester 12th – 14th September 2016.

Progress in scientific research is dependent on the quality and accessibility of research software at all levels. It is now critical to address many new challenges related to the development, deployment, maintenance, and sustainability of open-use research software: the software upon which specific research results rely. Open-use software means that the software is widely accessible (whether open source, shareware, or commercial). Research software means that the choice of software is essential to specific research results; using different software could produce different results.

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.