June 2016 National eResearch newsletter
AeRO Brief
AeRO’s new eResearch Jobs board (www.aero.edu.au/eresearch-careers) is proving to be very popular, with around twenty jobs typically listed at any one time. We are monitoring a wide range of organisational and advertising sites looking for career opportunities in our sector to promote. If your organisation has some eResearch related jobs, secondments or other opportunities, please let us know so we can let the world know! With AeRO in the final steps of formalising its new arrangements, the A will shortly stand for Australasian. We are actively seeking new Members from across Australasia now, tracking eResearch newsletters from Australia and other countries and today promoting eResearch job opportunities from our friends in New Zealand. As always, if your organisation wants to become a Member or propose or participate in AeRO activities, please get in touch with us via our website (www.aero.edu.au) or email (enquiries@aero.edu.au).
Dr Markus Buchhorn, AeRO CEO
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QUESTnet conference, 5–8 July 2016, Gold Coast
QUESTnet is focused on information technology used in higher education, and its audience is largely technologists who work in this sector.
A number of presenters from Australian eResearch services and infrastructure providers will be presenting at the Gold Coast-based conference, including from QCIF, Intersect and AARNet.
Check out the full program: http://questnet2016.net.au/program
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R Adelaide Workshop: Everything you need to know about running R and R Studio
This is a 3-day course aimed at beginner to intermediate-level R users, featuring experts from Uni of Adelaide’s Bioinformatics Hub, Nectar and eRSA.
The focus will be applications to a wide variety of biological data however people outside of this field will still gain many valuable skills.
Register Now: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/bioinformatics-hub/workshops/r-adelaide-2016/
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EMBL-ABR Developments
On her recent tours across Australia to talk to members of the bioinformatics community, Deputy Director, Assoc Prof Vicky Schneider, interviewed some of our experienced practitioners in the field and asked them what they wanted EMBL-ABR to achieve. These interviews with Mark Ragan, Mark Wilkins, Jac Charlesworth and Nathan Watson-Haigh are now online (eg see https://www.embl-abr.org.au/embl-abr-network-an-interview-with-mark-ragan/). Jason Williams, in Australia in April to deliver a workshop on CyVerse, shared his thoughts too in a generous interview, also online (https://www.embl-abr.org.au/jason-williams/).
Further developments at EMBL-ABR include the establishment of the International Science Advisory Group (https://www.embl-abr.org.au/news-isag/), bringing together a number of highly-regarded scientists from around the world to discuss and advise on EMBL-ABR strategy, activities and priorities.
So together we continue to build this crucial component of distributed national research infrastructure, providing bioinformatics support to life science researchers in Australia, set up as a collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI).
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Trove Celebrates one year of ORCID Integration
Over the last year, Trove has managed to automatically source more than twelve thousand Australians from ORCID. These researchers now appear in the Trove ‘People’ zone, each with their own biography and resource list. For those with existing profiles from other Trove content partners, the records are co-located for re-use in Australian research systems. The Trove presence gives users a more complete picture of the researcher’s life and work. It’s a great way to raise the profile of Australian researchers.
It’s also a way to see good metadata paying dividends. You might know that for two years a Trove search for an ARC/NHMRC grant identifier has returned the related publications from across Australia’s Institutional Repositories. Now, thanks to the ORCID integration, you’ll also find the Australian researchers involved.
The celebrations continue in the blog post powering ahead with ORCID one year on: http://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/trove/2016/05/31/orcid-one-year-on
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Hackathons Bring Tech Solutions to New Problems
“Software development has moved from one big sequential task to this idea of move quick and fail fast,” says Professor Fethi Rabhi from the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE).
Hackathons promote the idea that you don’t have to know exactly everything about a challenge, you can just start and refine your idea as you go. It’s very closely aligned with how innovation should be done.
See the UNSW Newsroom, 18th May 2016 http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/students/hackathons-bring-tech-solutions-new-problems
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The eResearch Australasia Conference 2016
This will be taking place from 10 – 14 October, at the Pullman Albert Park, Melbourne, Australia.
The conference aims to provide a catalyst for innovation and collaboration by bringing together researchers, practitioners, and educators from diverse disciplines in the sector as well as a forum to support the development, enhancement, and harmonisation of international, national, regional and discipline-specific eResearch infrastructures and services.
Our invited speakers include: Professor Peter Doherty, Daniel S. Katz, Elyas Khan, Professor John Mattick, Liza Noonan, and Associate Professor Margaret Simons.
This year’s sponsorship levels have been updated and improved to provide a much wider variety of choices for potential participants.
More information about the conference can be found at https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/
Please contact the team at Conference Design for questions regarding the eResearch Australasia Conference: eresearch@conferencedesign.com.au www.conferencedesign.com.au +61 3 6231 2999
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Need help with the Nectar Research Cloud? Join our free workshop!
Nectar and eRSA are collaborating to provide free workshop for researchers interested in cloud computing using the Nectar research cloud.
This workshop will provide an overall introduction to the cloud and all the basic tools you need to know to run your first cloud computer.
The workshop is aimed at beginners to the Nectar research cloud.
Register Now: http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/ersa-workshop-a-practical-introduction-to-the-nectar-cloud-tickets-25660868348
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RCC’s Fran Berman seminar video now on YouTube
Did you miss seeing Professor Francine Berman, the US lead of the global Research Data Alliance, speak at The University of Queensland on Friday, 27 May, about building a sustainable ecosystem for data-driven research? Never fear, the Research Computing Centre has posted a recording of the seminar on YouTube. Watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_vl2J7syRU.
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ITnews features the work of eResearch Infrastructure in Queensland
Queensland eResearch infrastructure was mentioned in two ITnews stories published in the last month.
“Queensland research cloud boosts HPC arsenal”, published on 1 June, focused on QCIF and QRIScloud, particularly the addition of 1,500 cores to QRIScloud. See http://www.itnews.com.au/news/queensland-research-cloud-boosts-hpc-arsenal-420274
“Inside the tech supporting the bleeding edge of neuroscience”, published on 30 May, showcased the Queensland Brain Institute’s resources and mentioned its potential use of Nectar, QRIScloud and the resources of UQ’s Research Computing Centre. See www.itnews.com.au/news/inside-the-tech-supporting-the-bleeding-edge-of-neuroscience-420132#ixzz4A6lHpTIj
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Did you know ReDBox does Research Data Management Planning?
Interest in ReDBox’s Research Data Management Planning (RDMP) tool has spiked following its inclusion in an ANDS webinar on 21 April 2016 – see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diF_M3Div7I&feature=youtu.be.
ReDBox is the QCIF-supported open source platform for managing and publishing research data collections. ReDBox’s RDMP tool provides forms and workflows that can be tailored for managing data management plans in-line with an institution’s RDMP policies and procedures.
If potential users don’t have a current ReDBox implementation, QCIF can host ReDBox for you with our ReDBox Lite service. If you would like to know more about ReDBox and ReDBox RDMP, please contact QCIF’s Gavin Kennedy: gavin.kennedy@qcif.edu.au.
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Australians at TNC16
With 719 delegates from 65 countries, TNC (The Networking Conference) is probably the most significant international HE networking conference in the world, certainly in Europe. It is run by GEANT, the pan-European network organisation. It ran from 12-Jun to 17-Jun in Prague. Following on Sarah Kenderdine’s keynote at last year’s conference, once again an Australian was invited to give a keynote, this time Steven Tingay, now based in Italy, who talked about some of the networking, computing and storage challenges of the SKA. Another Australian speaking was Hilary Goodson, AARNet, addressing the culture institutions issues for network organisations. Copies of presentations and streaming video will shortly be available on the conference website at https://tnc16.geant.org/core/schedule/list/day/all
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Note: This Newsletter is based on contributions provided by members of the eResearch community, and also draws on the many news articles and newsletters published across our sector. The Newsletter will be published monthly, on about the 16th of each month. Please send any contributions (no more than 150 words, plus a link) or pointers to any other relevant articles or newsletters to editor@aero.edu.au.
Archives of these Newsletters are held at http://aero.edu.au/newsletters/.
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