October 2022 Newsletter
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.
It has been a busy start to the academic year for us, with a welcome return to more in-person inductions and events. On Monday 17th, we have a stand at the UoB Employee Benefits Fair between 12-2pm, come see us if you’ve got any queries, or would like to get your own BEAR cub! We are so pleased to have some of our BEAR Challenge winners taking part in the CIUK Cluster Challenge starting this month, good luck to the Runtime Terrors representing UoB at this national competition.
It’s another jam-packed newsletter this month, with a mixture of BEAR and computing-related news, plus a spotlight on PGRs:
- Data Horror Stories Digital Research Conversation
- News on our Survey Outcomes
- Spotlight on PGRs
- Call for Software Carpentries Instructors and Helpers
- Case study: Using BEAR to Build a Database
- Apply for Time on Sulis (Tier 2 HPC)
- How to Log a Ticket with BEAR
- RSE Midlands Coding Club
- Byte-sized RSE Sessions
- In-Person and Virtual BEAR Drop-in Sessions
Data Horror Stories Digital Research Conversation
Apologies for the additional email earlier this week but with only 3 weeks to go (Wednesday 2nd November, 12-2.10pm), we wanted to give as much notice as possible that we have an upcoming Digital Research Conversation, covering data horror stories. Featuring researchers from Psychology and Modern Languages, plus tips from BEAR and Library Services, find more information and book your in-person place here.
News on our Survey Outcomes
We wanted to keep you updated on our progress with the results of the IT Needs of Active Research Survey. We have been busy presenting the results to research-related Committees, as well as relevant areas of Professional Services for follow-up, including End User Services and the Library. In general, the majority of respondents were happy with the provision of BEAR services, and solutions exist, or are in the pipelines, for many of the comments arising. We are currently contacting individuals with more specific comments that require follow-up and composing a blog post summarising the key outcomes and any actions we are taking, which will be sent out to this mailing list shortly.
Spotlight on PGRs
We’ve been getting out to as many postgraduate researcher (PGR) inductions and events as we can over the last month but we wanted to highlight some specific resources and opportunities for PGRs. We have a blog post on ‘I’m doing a PhD, how can BEAR help me?’ and a Canvas course for an Introduction to BEAR – self-enrol link is here: https://canvas.bham.ac.uk/enroll/E3CACD. We have specific opportunities for PGRs (and early-career researchers) to be on the organising Committee for the upcoming BEAR Conference and to become a Carpentries Instructor or Helper (see below).
Call for Software Carpentries Instructors and Helpers
You may be aware that the BEAR team runs Software Carpentry courses on Python, Git, MATLAB and R with the assistance of a number of trained instructors from across the university. We would like to encourage more people to get involved as both trainers and course helpers – to find out more read our blog post on the ‘Call for Carpentries Trainers & Helpers’.
Case Study: Using BEAR to Build a Database
In this month’s case study, we hear from BEAR Champion Nezha Acil about how she has made use of the storage, data processing and training available from BEAR to produce a database consisting of 345 million individual forest disturbance patches. In her case study blog post, Nezha describes the workflow and processing needed to produce the data, which is now being used to classify wind-related damage on forests. Previous case studies are available via our blog post category here.
Apply for Time on Sulis (Tier 2 HPC)
As an HPC Midlands+ consortium partner, we have access to the Sulis Tier 2 HPC facility, which provides CPU and GPU resources. The Tier 2 facilities are available when a researcher requires compute resources to supplement those available on BlueBEAR. We are accepting project proposals for the Sulis six-month allocation period that will run from November 2022 to April 2023. For more information, please see https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/bear/tier2hpc and to apply for time, please contact us via the service desk: Request Access to a Tier 2 HPC System.
How to Log a Ticket with BEAR
You may not be aware that there are direct routes to create a Service Desk ticket with the BEAR team, without it needing to be triaged through the central IT Service Desk (these links require you to login to the Service Desk):
RSE Midlands Coding Club
In the next month we will be starting up the rse-midlands coding club, where Midlands-based Research Software Engineers (RSE’s), or those in an RSE-related area of work (research that requires the development of usage of software) are invited to attend and give talks. We hope that this coding club will provide a space where people can learn from each other, share ideas, and interesting areas of research and research software. You can keep updated on these events via the mailing list, the rse-midlands website or follow us on Twitter @RSE_Midlands. We will also be looking for speakers to share their RSE projects or experience working with RSEs, please email Gavin at g.yearwood@bham.ac.uk if interested.
Byte-sized RSE Sessions
Byte-sized RSE is a new series of short interactive tutorial sessions where you can learn key skills to improve how you write and manage your research software in just 1 hour! There will be opportunities to gain hands-on experience, and to ask questions, in an informal and informative environment. Hosted and run by the UNIVERSE-HPC project, there are regular sessions over the coming months covering a wide variety of topics including GitHub tips, writing a good README file, Python testing, package managers, code style and linting, and code review. The first session on Software Licensing will be on Tuesday 18th October at 13:00 BST on Zoom – register here.
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 being held at least once a month in a public, visible campus location, 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 additional in-person date(s) shortly for November. Upcoming dates are also listed below:
- In-person – Monday 17th October, 12:00-14:00 – UoB Employee Benefits Fair, Great Hall, Aston Webb
- Via Zoom – Friday 21st October, 11:00-12:00
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 1st November, 11:00-12:00
- Via Zoom – Monday 14th November, 13:30-14:30
- Via Zoom – Friday 2nd December, 11:00-12:00
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