May 2019 national eResearch newsletter

Can you help us make the AAF better for your organisation?  Answer a short 10-minute survey to tell us more about your organisation, and help us shape the AAF’s future activities.

To complete the survey, go to 2019 AAF website and pick the survey relevant to you –  https://aaf.edu.au/news/index.html.

The survey closes on Friday 24 May 2019 and does not collect any individually identifying information.

Title:  Data for the Planet: driving solutions for resilient cities, disaster risk reduction and infectious diseases.

When:  Monday 3rd June, Finkel Theatre, ANU, 131 Garran Road, Acton.

The digital revolution offers profound opportunities for science to discover hitherto unsuspected patterns and relationships in nature and society, on scales from the nanoscale to the cosmic, from local health systems to global sustainability.  The International Science Council’s (ISC) CODATA Data Integration Project is tackling how integrating diverse data, from globally distributed sources, can help to combat infectious diseases, natural disasters and to build resilient and adaptive cities, and how it can tie these solutions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Registration:  https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/data-for-the-planet-tickets-61473657364

Contact Lesley Wyborn lesley.wyborn@anu.edu.au.

You are invited to present at the 13th eResearch Australasia Conference, taking place at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, 21 – 25 October 2019.

Conference workshops will be held on Monday 21 and Friday 25 October, with the main conference program running from Tuesday 22 to Thursday 24 October.

Submissions close on Friday 7 June for the following participation formats:

• Presentations
• Lightning talks
• Birds of a feather sessions (BoFs)
• Pre-Conference Workshops
• Hackathons

The theme for this year’s conference is “eResearch Diversity”.

See https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/abstract-submission/.

You are invited to nominate yourself or a colleague to be a Reviewer at the eResearch Australasia Conference to be held in October in Brisbane.  It is not necessary to be a delegate at the Conference to contribute as a Reviewer, but you will be acknowledged there for your contribution.  It is not an especially onerous task, and the more reviewers we have, the lighter will be the load.  Indeed, many Reviewers really appreciate the opportunity to see a cross-section of the work being done in eResearch in Australasia.  Guidelines are provided for scoring, and all is done online – so even if you are on holiday in Northern Scotland at the time, you can still help out!  Reviewing takes place after the closing date for submissions (currently 7-June) and continues for about 3 weeks.

If you would like to offer yourself as a Reviewer, please email the Co-Chair of the Conference Programme Committee, Retta Davis, at loretta@aero.edu.au.

See the Conference website at https://conference.eresearch.edu.au/.

The next monthly Tech Talk (virtually and at locations around Australia) will be held at 15:00-16:00 AEST on Friday, 7-Jun-19.  The topic will be announced shortly.

More information and how to rsvp (coming soon) can be seen at https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/.

See previous Tech Talks and (in most cases) slides, at https://www.meetup.com/monthlytechtalk/about/.

Did you know that EMBL-ABR has an established registry of workshops offered by Nodes across Australia?  These are input to an Elixir-EU database and the widget is on the EMBL-ABR website.  Researchers who are travelling may widen their search to include any global destination.

All 2018 training events were recorded and are online at this link (https://www.embl-abr.org.au/about/events/), also and scrolling down will display the registry listing.

Australian trainers wishing to list their training events may contact crhall@unimelb.edu.au.

Recently, FedUni hosted the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Ballarat Showcase.  The Digital Health CRC comprises a consortium of 15 universities, including FedUni, together with 69 government and industry partners.  The CRC aims to improve the health and health care of Australians and advance the economy with collaborative research and development using a combination of multi-disciplinary skills, industry knowledge, technologies, networks and data.  The Ballarat Showcase presented projects from the university and around the region, highlighting the vast breadth of skills and resources.  The showcase was attended by the Digital Health CRC managers, representatives from Ballarat’s health sector, and researchers from FedUni and Centre for eResearch and Digital innovation.

See http://www.cerdi.edu.au/cb_pages/digital_health.php.

And https://www.digitalhealthcrc.com/.

ResBaz Sydney is a low-cost festival co-organised by a group of universities in NSW that welcomes researchers and support staff across NSW, at all levels and disciplines.  This year, alongside training workshops, lightning talks and keynotes, there will be social activities planned across all 3 days.  On top of this, ResBaz Sydney 2019 will feature an extra HPC Day focused around research computing with workshops from NCI, commercial cloud providers and a plethora of commercial applications/tools.

ResBaz Sydney 2019 will be held at UNSW Sydney from 10th – 13th September.

Registration details and more info will be available soon at: https://resbaz.github.io/resbaz2019/sydney/.

More than 20 years of Australian web sites have been captured by the National Library and its partners and are now searchable on Trove.

Revisit where you worked, what you loved, where you lived and who you were.  The web has come a long way since 1996, so join us as we show you how it’s evolved and how you can rediscover your recent history in the Australian Web Archive.

See https://www.nla.gov.au/event/australian-web-archive-webinar.

Are you interested in the tools, processes and challenges associated with writing code and developing applications to support science?  New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) is gathering scientific programmers, software engineers, developers, and coding enthusiasts to share and discuss how they’re supporting research ecosystems.  Join us at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, NZ on 5-6 September. Registration is now open!

Registration & more information:  http://sciencecodingconference.nz/.

The 2019 Australasian Leadership Computing Symposium (ALCS) will be a unique event for the Australian computational science community.

Taking place from the 6th to the 8th of November at the Australian Academy of Science and The Australian National University in Canberra, ALCS 2019 will be Australia’s national research supercomputing users’ forum, as well as a flagship promotion of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data (HPD) in Australia.

Find out more on the event website at https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/Australasian+Leadership+Computing+Symposium+2019.

Researchers from ANU, Swinburne University and the University of Sydney have created a 90-nanometre thick material that blocks 80% of incoming light from all angles and wavelengths.  This material combines layers of graphene oxide and dielectric to produce this remarkable behaviour.  NCI’s supercomputer was crucial for figuring out the optimal arrangement of the layers.

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.

Here’s a sample of current vacancies:

DevOps Infrastructure Engineer, Cloud Services Technical Lead, Bioinformatics Research Officer, Multiple eResearch Analyst Positions, Identity Software Developer, Fibre Construction Project Manager, Communications Networks Research Engineer, Research Systems Security Compliance Analyst.