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.

The next Research IT club will take place on the 25^th of April 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.

Earlier this month, Research IT provided training for the University's Regenerative Medicine Centre for Doctoral Training. The training was arranged by the Software Sustainability Institute, and was a two day Software Carpentry workshop. The instructors were Mike Jackson from EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and David Mawdsley from Research IT.

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.

Did you know that there is a R users group at the University of Manchester? "R at University of Manchester" (R.U.M.), is an R User group open to all staff and students using R at The University of Manchester with regular meetings on the first Monday of each month.

The Research IT training team have just announced a new MATLAB course aimed at those who have basic experience of using MATLAB and want to learn to write MATLAB programs and functions to perform calculations. The course covers the basics of control flow, introduces how to get optimal performance from MATLAB, and also covers MATLAB's programming tools.

The academic year may have just ended but here in Research IT we are already planning ahead for the start of the next one! We have released our new training courses and dates which are now available for booking. Courses include introductions to Linux, high performance computing, Python and much more.

Wolfram Research in conjunction with Research IT, is hosting a 3 day, free summer workshop for researchers from across the N8 universities, including Manchester, on the 27^th – 29^th June.

Research IT members recently took part in a University of Manchester Digital Humanities workshop – “Introduction to data, the command line and automating tasks for the digital humanities”. The workshop was led by Jez Cope, Research Data Manager, University of Sheffield Library and support was provided by Gerard Capes and David Mawdsley (Research IT, UoM).

Are you a Social Scientist who works with data? Would you like to learn more about shell, git, data management best practices and data cleaning and R? If so then register now for the Data Carpentry workshop for Social Sciences 30 - 31 March.

Aimed at Social science researchers interested in coding, this workshop organised by the UK Data Service will provide researchers with a basic set of skills which are aimed at making the coding process more effective, less error prone and more maintainable.

Dates have been announced for tomography and 3D data images processing courses using Avizo for the next few months at the University of Manchester. The courses are run by the Manchester X-ray Imaging Facility (MXIF) at the Henry Moseley X-ray Imaging Facility, University of Manchester and are free to UoM researchers. External attendees are welcome to attend but there is a cost.