January 2019 National eResearch Newsletter

There is still time for you to be part of history with IDCC coming to Australia for the first time on 4-7 February 2019.  Come and join the international Digital Curation Centre (DCC) community and celebrate the DCC’s 15th birthday.

Check out the comprehensive program of invited speakers, papers, demos and workshops, plus some great social events planned to enjoy the summer nights in Melbourne.  If you have limited time availability, you can attend workshops without attending the conference and there are also one day registration options for the conference.

More information:  http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc19.

Webinar: The Carpentries: Teaching data science skills to researchers and people working in library – and information related roles

Tue 5 Feb, 12:00 – 13:00 AEDT

This webinar will describe The Carpentries: what is taught, why and how it’s taught, the impact it’s having, and what’s planned for next.

To register, go to https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/6103113463802583298.

This Tech Talk is aimed at the community of research software engineers, part of the international RSE community, and will focus on Recognition for Researchers who Code.  See https://rse-aunz.github.io/.

This meeting is aimed at academics/researchers who code, but are lacking recognition and metrics needed to progress their academic career;  or ‘generalists’ who bring communities together and can engage with both researchers and technical staff;  or professional software engineers working in the research space.

You can attend this session at various locations around Australia, or directly via Zoom.  3pm to 5pm AEDT, Friday 8-Feb-19.

Details and registration (coming soon) at https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/events/tljgdqyzdbcb/.

Join Chris Erdmann, Library Carpentry Community and Development Director from the California Digital Library, to hear about the role librarians can play in good data practices, why The Carpentries are a great vehicle for RDM engagement, and how you can get involved in this global community of people who help others to become more data savvy.

Perth, Brisbane, Sydney:  Building data savvy data stewards: nail the skills you need!

Perth, Mon 11 Feb, 9:30 – 3:30 AWST:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/perth-building-data-savvy-data-stewards-nail-the-skills-you-need-tickets-53376120413?ref=estw.

Brisbane, Thu 14 Feb, 9:30 – 12:00 AEST:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/brisbane-building-data-savvy-data-stewards-nail-the-skills-you-need-tickets-53378690099?ref=estw.

Sydney, Fri 15 Feb, 9:30 – 3:30 AEDT:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/sydney-building-data-savvy-data-stewards-nail-the-skills-you-need-tickets-53376460430?ref=estw.

eResearch NZ Conference 2019 – People, Powered, Research – will bring together researchers across disciplines and communities who are innovating the ways digital tools can be used to support and advance research outcomes in NZ and internationally.

Register before 18 January 2019 to get an Early Bird discount on full and single-day registrations.

See http://eresearch2019.org.nz/.

During the last financial year (2017/18), the ARDC convened a Data Services Interest Group around data service provision and consumption across the NCRIS facilities, science agencies, universities, and broader public sector.  This group is now requesting comments from interested individuals and organisations on a Good Practice Guide for the description of Metadata for Services and Related Collections.  Feedback submissions close on 15-Feb.

CAUDIT is looking forward to reviewing submissions for the inaugural ‘CAUDIT Awards’.  Of most interest to readers of this Newsletter will be the award for ‘Excellence in Research Support’ – https://www.caudit.edu.au/award-categories – sponsored by Dropbox Business – https://www.dropbox.com/business.

Awards will be presented in May at CAUDIT’s Autumn Members Meeting in Wollongong (held immediately after the close of the THETA 2019 conference – https://theta.edu.au/).

A small number of Trove’s full text digitised journals and gazettes are available for direct bulk download, as individual collections (see http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/building-with-trove/direct-bulk-download).  These do not require a Trove API access key and you do not need to write a program to harvest Trove’s data or work within the Trove API rate limits.

This bulk download option is available to everyone and files are made available on AARNet’s CloudStor service.

ARDC has now developed a new logo (see adjacent) and has built a new website.

See https://ardc.edu.au/.

Food security is one of the major global issues facing researchers and policymakers today, and crop infestation by weeds is one of the biggest threats to grain productivity.

Weeds cost Australian grain growers $3.3 billion per year, and cause annual yield losses of 2.7 million tonnes.

Scientists at Edith Cowan University’s Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI), alongside industry partners at the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and Photonic Detection Systems (PDS), are developing technology that will allow grain growers to apply herbicides more selectively and efficiently.  They train their AI system using HPC at Pawsey.

See https://pawsey.org.au/case_studies/artificial-intelligence-for-targeted-weed-control/.

Federation University Australia’s Centre for eResearch and Digital Innovation (CeRDI) has been awarded funding to lead a major project for Visualising Australasia’s Soils.  Funded by the Soil Co-operative Research Centre (CRC), the project will enable the development of an interoperable spatial knowledge system providing access to federated, cloud-based research data, information and knowledge on Australasian soils.  The project leverages established technologies to federate data from disparate sources in both the public and private sector, making agriculture data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).  The project team includes 3 research agencies and 15 industry-agency partners.

See:  https://www.soilcrc.com.au/projects-2/.

The 2nd Annual Humanities, Arts & Culture Data Summit together with the 3rd International DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop, will be held in Canberra from 27-29 Mar.

An Australia-Europe knowledge exchange, convened by the Australian Academy of the Humanities with the ARDC and the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities initiative (DARIAH), this event will explore new horizons for data-driven humanities and arts research, digital cultural collections and research infrastructure.

See https://www.humanities.org.au/advice/projects/hacdata/.

Launched on Friday 11th January 2019, the new user interface (UI) of the Data Access Portal (DAP, see https://data.csiro.au/) improves usability and showcases newly published data, software and services as well as featured collections.  The image gallery has been enhanced with multiple views.  Domain searches for virus images, pulsar and Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder data products have been improved.  Collection landing pages have been reorganised and highlight reuse information for licences and citations.  The DAP achieved certification from the CoreTrustSeal in 2018 and is a feature in the footer of the new UI.

Feedback is sought – contact:  researchdatasupport@csiro.au.

Another major milestone for the INDIGO subsea cable system between Australia and South East Asia has been reached with the landing of the INDIGO Central cable at Coogee Beach in Sydney.  This follows on from the landing of the cable in Perth in September last year.  The 9,200km INDIGO cable system, in which AARNet is partnering, will strengthen links between Australia and the fast-growing South East Asian markets, providing lower latency and enhanced reliability.

See https://news.aarnet.edu.au/australias-first-subsea-cable-connecting-sydney-and-perth-lands-in-sydney/.

With researchers sharing and working on increasingly large files, we realise your storage needs are also increasing.  So, to help researchers store more, we’re giving them all a terabyte of space.  The storage allocation for individual research users at AARNet-connected institutions is now 1 TB (1,000 GB) – up from 100 GB.

See https://news.aarnet.edu.au/researchers-now-get-1tb-personal-storage-space-on-cloudstor/.

Don’t forget that AeRO is helping spread the word on the latest eResearch job opportunities.  We post jobs immediately to https://twitter.com/AeRO_eResearch and also update on our website at http://aero.edu.au/eresearch-careers/.

This is a free service for the eResearch community – to advertise a position, simply email loretta@aero.edu.au.

Current vacancies include: an eResearch Engagement Specialist, a Research Content and Repositories Librarian, a Digital Preservation Technical Analyst, a DevOps Automation Engineer, an HPC and Cloud Systems Manager, 2 x eResearch Analysts, an RDA Executive Assistant, a Digital Content Officer, a Content Procurement Manager, a Computational Biology Research Officer, a Digitisation Project Officer, an eScience Infrastructure HPC Senior Science Advisor and Platforms Architect, a Fibre Construction Project Manager, a Research Systems Security Compliance Analyst, Multiple eResearch Analyst and Research ICT Positions.