Girish Ramesh from the Textiles and Apparel Group in the School of Materials was one of the first users of our prototype Visualization and Data Analysis Laboratory (vDAL). He used the powerful machines to visualise hair as part of his PhD and also as part of the prestigious Google Summer of Code.

As part of the Data Science Research Partnership between BBC R&D and the University of Manchester, one of our research software engineers (RSE), Josh Woodcock, spent 3 months working with BBC R&D to develop a way to visualise click data from an internal trial of the Cook-Along Kitchen Experience (CAKE). Involved in the project were Jonathan Carlton (PhD student with BBC R&D and University of Manchester), Andy Brown (BBC R&D), John Keane and Caroline Jay (University of Manchester).

We recently set up a mailing list for UoM UK Biobank users to connect with other UoM UK-Biobank users, ask questions and keep up to date with the community at the University. We would now like to invite UoM UK Biobank users and potential users to what we hope is the first of several events for our local community.

As part of the Research Lifecycle Programme (RLP) we are looking at procurement processes alongside HPC provision. We know that many researchers at the University are already using Cloud provision and that many more would like to do so. However at the moment there is no official process in place to procure or access Cloud resources.

Thank you to everyone who came along to the latest Research IT Club and especially those who took the opportunity to ask questions! To see presentations on the latest news from the research lifecycle programme (RLP), research IT infrastructure and software engineering and applications support as well as an interesting use for your Android phone, click on the links below.

We have just announced a new course – Introduction to Mathematica, which is available now for booking to all research staff and PGRs. Remember that all our courses are free to University of Manchester staff and PGRs!

Research IT has recently been involved in an exciting new use case which aimed to help people with a chronic lung disease self-report the impact of their symptoms on their wellbeing and to view their data.

We are pleased to say that the HPC business case to the Research Lifecycle Programme was successful! This means that we now have substantial funds to invest in research IT infrastructure such as computational resource, VMs, storage, etc and we need your help!

New researcher or PGR student? Completely confused about Research IT? Come along to a drop-in session and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face. We run regular drop-in sessions where you can come along and ask anything about research IT – issues with research software applications, problems with your code, queries about research data management or perhaps just to find out more about new technologies such as data visualization!

The popular conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK), returns with the main theme of “Research Computing Delivers” and also be four sub-themes of “Career paths - service provision roles”, "Working with industry", Applications science" and “Data science”. Students who are interested in attending can submit a poster abstract which, if accepted, will grant them free registration to the event.

Did you know that you can speak to members of the Research IT team face to face without making an appointment? We run regular drop-in sessions where you can come along and ask anything about research IT – issues with research software applications, problems with your code, queries about research data management or perhaps just to find out more about new technologies such as data visualization!

Are you interested in using mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, for real-time, interactive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – the simulation of fluid flow? If so then come along to our first club of the new academic year on the 11th of October! You can find out more about this and the opportunities that digital transformation could bring to the university.