Dropbox for Business, our external file sharing service is arriving soon, stopover and find out what’s on offer and how to get on board.

Research IT has been providing the SpiNNaker project with research software engineer (RSE) expertise to help them simulate billions of simple neurons in order to create brain inspired computing systems.

All staff and researchers are responsible for ensuring that any private data is kept secure, and IT Services can help you do that with your old computer equipment.

Throwing an old hard drive or computer in the bin or leaving it a loading bay, risks exposing confidential information to someone with malicious intentions. It’s usually possible to recover deleted files, and often possible to retrieve information from a faulty hard drive.

The consequences of this can be catastrophic; the University could be fined up to £500,000 for a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. There’s also the possibility of confidential research data being exposed, and personal or reputational damage.

Don’t risk it.

If you have any old laptops, computer hard drives, USB drives, DVDs or even dusty old floppy disks to dispose of, bring them to B29 Pariser Building or the Kilburn Building IT Support Centre, where all the data will be securely deleted and processed appropriately.

You can can even bring old keyboards, mice and other small peripherals, but please speak to a colleague in the IT Support Centre first if you need to dispose of larger items such as desktop PCs, monitors or printers, as they may need to collect these from you.

Find out more:

• IT Services: Disposal and re-use of equipment
• IT Services: help and support

Note for staff and researchers in labs: If your IT equipment is currently in a lab which requires decontamination before disposal, please ensure this takes place before you remove it.

The next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club will take place on the 14^th of July with registration closing on the 12^th.

Register now to hear about the new University of Manchester Data Science Institute from Prof Magnus Rattray and developments in Data Science at Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMIST) from Prof Rachel Gibson. There is also a keynote presentation from Peter Smyth from the UK Data Service explaining how you can get involved with the UK Data Service’ Hadoop system. This will be followed by a presentation from a local Hadoop user, Mihaly Berekmeri, who will relate his experience of using Hadoop and IBM BigSQL.

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.

The next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club will take place on the 14^th of July and will feature a keynote presentation from Peter Smyth from the UK Data Service on their Hadoop system entitled “The challenges of building and populating a secure but accessible big data environment for researchers in the Social Sciences and related disciplines.”. This meeting will focus on the use of Hadoop across the university and will feature presentations from UoM researchers.

And be in with a chance of winning £250, £150 or £100 of Amazon Vouchers!

The demand for visualization of datasets through the creation of meaningful and attractive representations of data, and to provide insight and greater understanding of data is rapidly growing. There are many existing applications, ranging from Excel to more sophisticated and complex software like Matlab, Python, R, Mathematica, and STATA.

From feedback, we have identified a need for an application that falls in between these two extremes and we would like your help in evaluating potential applications. This evaluation will help select an application for wider adoption across the University, along with training, support and central licensing.

We have selected Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and IBM Watson Analytics for a more detailed evaluation by the community.

For important security-related reasons, University of Manchester computational platforms are not accessible directly from outside the campus, nor can UoM platforms directly access Web and FTP sites which are off-campus.

The University end of financial year is not far away! As usual, Research IT anticipate making a procurement for the Computational Shared Facility (CSF) and other Research Infrastructure platforms at this time.

Registration is now open for the next meeting of the UoM Data Science Club which will take place Thursday the 19^th May. The meeting will feature a Big Data “show and tell” from colleagues at the University of Sheffield particularly focusing on their recent experiences of using Jupyter lab notebooks and Sagemath Cloud.

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.

We are looking for volunteers to help evaluate a number of general data analytics and visualisation tools to bridge the gap to more specialised software such as MatLab and Python.