QRISnews February 2017: ResBaz Brisbane 2017 starts TOMORROW; QRIScompute service for research portals; Nextcloud service offers 150 GB of storage.

ResBaz Brisbane 2017: bigger, better and almost here

This week’s Brisbane Research Bazaar will be bigger than last year’s with more attendees, more speakers, more sponsors and more (mostly free) events for researchers to network and build their digital literacy skills.

QCIF will give away two Raspberry Pi devices at the event, being held 7–9 February at The University of Queensland, St Lucia. Attendees just need to enter their name for the draw on the ResBaz Festival Day, 7 February.

The community-building event encourages attendees to find potential research collaborators across disciplines, share skills, and learn about IT-related services and techniques to aid research.

All Queensland researchers and research support staff are welcome to attend ResBaz.

Tuesday’s Festival Day will involve a poster session, a Hacky Hour in which researchers can bring any research IT question, an ‘Ask a Data Scientist’ booth, a booth specifically for R programming-related questions, stalls about bioinformatics and ecoscience modelling, and more.

Generous sponsors will cover morning tea and lunch on Tuesday, and Auckland’s ResBaz will meet virtually with Brisbane Festival Day goers.

Currently, 300 people have signed up for the Festival Day, but more are welcome — just register online.

Wednesday and Thursday will be packed with workshops on R, Python, Open Refine, Web scraping, Galaxy, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and more. There will be half-day workshops on technology in humanities research, and how to be a 21^st Century Academic. Most workshops are fully booked, however places are still available for the AWS and the TERN CoESRA workshops.

ResBaz speakers include Adrian White from AWS, social scientist Jenny Ostini, coder Caleb Hattingh, HealthHack organiser Mike Imelfort, and Health Sciences researcher Michael Jakimowicz. Adrian will host a full-day workshop on AWS; Jenny will outline her interests in digital literacies, communication and social change; Caleb will talk about Python and coding; Mike will discuss leaving academia for industry; and Michael will talk about using LaTeX, a tool used by many scientists, to write collaboratively in the cloud.

Those in or out of Brisbane are encouraged to attend. USQ is providing a brown bag lunch for those travelling on its mini-bus between Toowoomba and Brisbane each day of ResBaz. QCIF eResearch Analyst Dr Francis Gacenga will drive the “Resbus”, which is currently fully booked. Those at USQ wishing to be waitlisted for the bus in case of cancellations can contact Francis: Francis.Gacenga@usq.edu.au.

New QRIScompute service supporting research community portals

QRIScloud has a new compute service designed to host research portals that support communities of researchers and research groups by giving their members access to a portfolio of data collections and computational tools.   

The QRIScomputeHA (the ‘HA’ stands for High Availability) service provides production portals with a higher level of availability and reliability for compute.

Portals assigned to the QRIScomputeHA service are expected to support communities over years and will be allocated with long expiry dates.   

TERN’s SuperSites and LTERN (pictured) portals and the Quadrant service have been early adopters of the new service.

QRIScomputeHA replaces part of Nectar’s National Server Program (NSP) as Nectar has funded five nodes to pick up the NSP service.   

Research communities running research portals on QRIScloud are encouraged to move them to QRIScomputeHA. Please contact the QRIScloud Help Desk. A Getting Started Guide is available to help users request an allocation.

150 GB of storage available to users of QRIScloud’s Nextcloud service

QRIScloud has made 150 GB of data storage available to each user of its Nextcloud service.

This storage allocation will help users take advantage of Nextcloud’s capabilities. Nextcloud gives users the ability to find, manipulate, share and synchronise all their files wherever they are stored through a single and simple interface.

Nextcloud storage is backed by QRIScloud’s replication processes, which protects users’ data against media failure.

A Getting Started Guide demonstrates how to use Nextcloud.

The service is currently in a pilot phase, and we welcome more users to trial it and provide feedback on their experience. If you would like to participate in the pilot, please contact the QRIScloud Help Desk.

A previous article about Nextcloud was featured in the November 2016 issue of QRISnews.

QFAB offers biostatistics and bioinformatics support for grant applications

QFAB provides researchers from member universities with free consultations to strengthen the bioinformatics, biostatistics and biodata content in their research grant applications.

Researchers can include the use of QFAB bioinformatics services into their grant applications to ensure the project outcomes will be guided by professionally conducted bioinformatics and demonstrating this professionalism to grant assessors. More info

Gareth Price joins QFAB as Head of Computational Biology

A former Mater Health Services Chief Scientist has joined QFAB Bioinformatics as its new Head of Computational Biology.

Dr Gareth Price (pictured) has 15 years’ experience as a genomics scientist, a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Melbourne, and was a Chief Scientist at the Mater for almost a decade until December 2016.

In his new QFAB role, Gareth will work closely with researchers providing expertise in the design and analysis of genomics projects, including solving complex computational and statistical problems as they relate to interpreting biological data.

Gareth is looking forward to helping researchers get the most out of their high-throughput research data, improving the time between data generation and summarisation, ready for the important phase of data interpretation and result discovery.

“My view is that life science and clinical research are at their best when coupled with the most accurate, highest throughput and innovative technology and analysis,” he said.

Gareth has more than 10 years’ experience in running labs utilising microarray and NGS technologies to address a variety of human and human pathogen related conditions.

He has expertise in experimental design, assay performance, data quality control, data analysis and data interpretation in genomics; from both microarray and Next Gen platforms and proteomics using MALDI-MS. These works have involved a variety of model organisms from micro-organisms, fruit flies, mice to humans.

To discuss your genomics or proteomics project’s research needs, please contact Gareth via email (g.price@qfab.org) or phone 07 3346 2638.

More compute, data and training events — look back at QCIF and QRIScloud's 2016

Last year involved a bumper crop of QCIF events and training activities, and much greater usage of QRIScompute and QRISdata. Thank you to all the researchers, research groups and support staff who worked with us last year. We look forward to what we hope will be an even better year this year.

Check out some of the figures below, and click here (PDF, 163 KB) for the full infographic.

USQ researcher becomes 100^th member of rOpenSci

USQ Associate Professor Adam Sparks (pictured) recently became the 100th member of the global rOpenSci community with his R software package on global weather data.

The rOpenSci community—which includes students, software developers and scientists—helps with the creation, distribution and promotion of software packages that allow access to data repositories in the R statistical programming environment for other scientists and researchers to use. This helps make scientific methods easily shared, replicated and used by others.

Dr Sparks, a field crops pathologist, said this community support helped him create a more comprehensive R package to benefit other scientists worldwide working with weather data.

His contribution, named ‘GSODR’, involves his use in earlier research of Global Surface Summary of the Day weather data from the US National Climatic Data Center. Dr Sparks said the rOpenSci review process and continuing technical support of its community has helped make his R package “a much better piece of software.”

Don't miss out on QFAB's upcoming workshops

QFAB Bioinformatics has nine upcoming training workshops across February and March focusing on R, Python, Galaxy and SPSS.

QFAB members receive a discounted price on training costs. Check the QFAB website for further information and to register for each workshop.

QFAB banner logo

QRIScloud is funded by the Australian Government, the Queensland State Government and the QCIF member universities. The Australian Government directs funds through the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (Nectar) Project (led by The University of Melbourne), and the Research Data Storage Infrastructure Project, completed in 2015, and the Research Data Services (RDS) Project (both data projects led by The University of Queensland) using the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and Education Investment Fund (EIF). The Queensland Government directs funds through the Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation (DSITI) and its Co-investment Fund.

ResBaz Brisbane 2017: bigger, better and almost here

New QRIScompute service supporting research community portals

150 GB of storage available to users of QRIScloud’s Nextcloud service

QFAB offers biostatistics and bioinformatics support for grant applications

Gareth Price joins QFAB as Head of Computational Biology

More compute, data and training events — look back at QCIF and QRIScloud's 2016

USQ researcher becomes 100^th member of rOpenSci

Don't miss out on QFAB's upcoming workshops

February 2017

Upcoming Events

Featured Article

ResBaz Brisbane 2017: bigger, better and almost here

New QRIScompute service supporting research community portals

150 GB of storage available to users of QRIScloud’s Nextcloud service

QFAB offers biostatistics and bioinformatics support for grant applications

Gareth Price joins QFAB as Head of Computational Biology

More compute, data and training events — look back at QCIF and QRIScloud's 2016

USQ researcher becomes 100th member of rOpenSci

Don't miss out on QFAB's upcoming workshops

February 2017

Upcoming Events

Featured Article

USQ researcher becomes 100^th member of rOpenSci