February 2023 Newsletter
Air quality map over West Midlands for 2016, as part of modelling work in the WM-Air (the West Midlands Air Quality Improvement Programme) project - see Dr Jian Zhong's case study
Welcome to the BEAR Newsletter, bringing you the latest news from the BEAR team (Birmingham Environment for Academic Research), as well as other relevant computing and data-related news from both within the University of Birmingham and outside.
This month, we are continuing our BEAR on Tour (#BearonTour) series with a visit to Dr Richard Turner, in the PRISM2 research group(School of Metallurgy and Materials). Find out about the group’s research in the Bear on Tour blog post. Read below to find out more about an exciting opportunity for PGRs to speak at the 12th BEAR Conference plus lots of other data and computing-related news and events.
In this newsletter we cover:
- BEAR outage in April
- 12th BEAR PGR Conference – call for speakers
- Love Data Week
- Blog post for postgraduate researchers
- RSE Midlands Coding Club February session
- Case study on modelling air quality using BlueBEAR
- Training workshops
- Call for volunteers/testers who use AI, ML or TDM
- In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
BEAR outage in April
We would like to give BEAR users advance notice that there will be an outage of all BEAR services (most likely in the second half of April) for an upgrade to the cooling system in the data centre, doubling our current capacity. For further details please see our blog post on the extended BEAR outage here.
12th BEAR PGR Conference - call for speakers
We are pleased to announce that the 12th BEAR Conference organised by a PGR Committee will be running on the 19th & 20th April. Keynote speakers currently include Professor Stephen Jarvis and Professor Ole Jensen. The Committee invites research students for whom High Performance Computing has enabled their research to either give an oral presentation, flash presentation or poster to a non-specialist audience. For more details and the abstract submission form (deadline 28th February) see the BEAR Conference 2023 page, where you can also register to attend.
Love Data Week
Whilst we have had to postpone the session on Software Licensing until early June due to speaker availability, the planned ‘Love your data’ session is still going ahead on Wednesday 15th February (12-2pm). Join us for lunch to hear lightning talks from Library and Advanced Research Computing, covering topics to help you manage your research data effectively, plus time for Q&A. There are still a few places left, book yours via the love your data session Eventbrite page here.
Blog post for postgraduate researchers
Are you a PostGraduate Researcher (PGR) wanting to know more about how BEAR can help you, or do you supervise PGRs and want to ensure that they are aware of everything available to them? Our Research Training and Engagement Officer, Debbie Carter, has written a post for the UoB PGR Development blog. Don’t forget our Introduction to BEAR Canvas course is available too.
RSE Midlands Coding Club February session
The next RSE Midlands Coding Club event will be held on Thursday 23rd February at 11am in the ERI building, room 149 or you can attend online via Zoom. Dr Gavin Yearwood from Advanced Research Computing, will be covering the creation of the RSE Midlands regional group, sharing his experiences and advice on organising events. Keep updated via the rse-midlands website or on Twitter @RSE_Midlands.
Case study on modelling air quality using BlueBEAR
In this month’s featured case study, Dr Jian Zhong from Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences explains how he has been using BlueBEAR to cut down the time taken to run his air quality models from weeks to just 35 hours.
Training workshops
We still have spaces available on upcoming training courses, including R, MATLAB, Git and the three NVIDIA workshops covering accelerated computing and deep learning. For more information and to sign up, see our training website.
Call for volunteers/testers who use AI, ML or TDM
Library Services are currently looking at their workflows for digitising print based materials to see if the outputs produced are suitable for use in AI/ ML/ TDM research activity. If these outputs are not usable, what changes would researchers require to make the outputs usable? Library Services would like to hear from any colleagues using AI, Machine Learning, Text & Data Mining or related technologies within their research, to understand how digitisation methods might support that activity. Volunteers will be asked for their feedback on the usability of the outputs produced using the current process and on others produced using update processes. The outcomes of this project will feed into discussions around service development.
If you are able to spare some time to explore this with the library that would be fantastic. If you have colleagues or students you think might be able to help please do pass this on. If you are interested please email a.fenlon@bham.ac.uk
In-person and virtual BEAR drop-in sessions
We are currently holding both in-person and virtual drop-in sessions. In-person drop-ins are held at least once a month in a variety of campus locations, with additional virtual drop-in sessions via Zoom for those not on campus or who require specialist help, so that we can find a relevant member of the team.
Further details, including how to join the virtual sessions are available on our drop-in webpage, where we plan to add in-person date(s) shortly for February & March. Upcoming dates are also listed below:
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 21st February, 13:30 – 14:30
- Via Zoom – Thursday 9th March, 11:00 – 12:00
Missed last month's newsletter?
Find January's newsletter here. Sign up to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox by joining our bear-updates mailing list here (UoB login required).