Research IT Research Software engineers, Anja Le Blanc and Douglas Lowe recently ran a five day scripting workshop for NERC funded Environmental Science PhD students. Find out more about the workshop and the challenges of running such a workshop online

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 staff will be teaching and assisting on a Software Carpentry Workshop in May which aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. The workshop is free to post-graduate students and employees of the University of Manchester.

There will be two introductory workshops for working with the maths software Maple and MapleSim (modeling and simulation tool). These workshops will introduce you to a number of teaching and research applications using Maplesoft tools.

The Manchester SIAM-IMA Student Chapter is proud to host the first Julia workshop in the UK, taking place on 19-20th September 2016 at the University of Manchester. This two-day workshop consists of six plenary talks and two practical sessions led by core Julia contributors. The workshop aims to explain what Julia is, how to use it and how it is used in areas such as optimisation, natural language processing, statistics, materials science and computational biology.

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.

Research IT will be running a new full-day course providing an intensive hands-on introduction to version control using Git on Wednesday 6th July 2016.

The course is aimed at those who have no or little experience of version control. It will cover:

• What version control is;
• The main benefits of using version control;
• How to set up and work with a local repository;
• How to work with remote repositories using GitHub;
• Topics such as branching, resolving conflicts, merging and rebasing;
• Working collaboratively on one repository.

The Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) will be running the Research Data Visualisation Workshop on July 28th, 2016 at the University of Manchester. If you create data visualisations and plan to visualise new data sets or would like to know about data visualisation toolings and uses then this is the workshop for you.

Do you use maps, mapping technologies and/or methods in your research? Would you like to develop your research in this area?

The Geography Department, Digital Humanities@Manchester, Methods@manchester and the John Rylands Library are running a joint workshop on Monday 13th June to identify researcher needs in this area across the Faculty of Humanities.

Dr. Wadud Miah from The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) will be running a Fortran Modernisation Workshop at STFC on 27^th-28^th October 2016. It is a completely free event and is open to non-STFC attendees.

This two day computational science-centric practical hands on workshop is aimed at Fortran programmers who want to write modern code, or modernise existing codes, to make it more readable and maintainable by encouraging good software engineering practices. Adopting good software practices makes codes more amenable to optimization and parallelisation, and the path to making it a community code a whole lot easier.

There will be a Drishti workshop on volume visualisation and analysis which will take place on 13 June 2016 (9:30 start in the visualisation suite in HMXIF at Manchester). This will be a practical workshop so attendees will cover how to convert tomography data into Drishti format, process and export it to the interactive software for display on a touchscreen.