Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Newsletter
It’s been great to meet so many new PhD students at various college and school inductions over the last few weeks, and to see so much interest in the new training workshops that we are providing. To help spread the word about the many ways that BEAR services can help researchers, in collaboration with BEAR Champion Christopher Shave, we have created a 1 minute video of ‘A day in the life of an image analysis specialist’.
Included in this month’s newsletter:
- News from the Advanced Research Computing team
- BEAR training workshops – spaces available
- Sustainability update – energy monitoring tool on BlueBEAR
- Meet the Data Scientists – online drop-in sessions
- News from the Julia Special Interest Group
- MATLAB Special Interest Group relaunch
- Linking articles on Pure with BEAR services
- Opportunities to present at Computing Insight UK (CIUK2025)
- Case study on Nano-org – a Research Software Group collaboration with researchers in Immunology & Immunotherapy
- BEAR drop-in session dates
News from the Advanced Research Computing team
Back in September, two undergraduate students from Theoretical Physics came to spend a week experiencing work in the Advanced Research Computing team. You can find out more about their experience in Sereya and Harry’s blog post.
BEAR training workshops – spaces available
We have a few spaces available on upcoming training courses this term, including MATLAB, R, Linux and Git. New dates have just been released for Software Carpentry Python and NVIDIA CUDA C++. For full details and to book, go to our training webpages.
Sustainability update – energy monitoring tool on BlueBEAR
Further to the updates in our sustainable computing blog post mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we are pleased to announce that the ‘Green Algorithms 4 HPC’ tool for energy reporting is now available to load as a module on our supercomputer, BlueBEAR. Find out how to use it via the job energy usage documentation on BEAR Docs.
Meet the Data Scientists – online drop-in sessions
The Research Data Scientists are inviting interested researchers to their upcoming online drop-in sessions (dates below). This is a great opportunity to chat to our team of Research Data Scientists to find out more about the Research Data Science service, and discuss how they can support your research.
- Friday 14 November – 14:00-15:00 – Joining link
- Thursday 4 December – 14:00-15:00 – Joining link
If you can’t make it on the day, then contact them to arrange a conversation or get advice on project scoping and costing.
News from the Julia Special Interest Group
The Julia Special Interest Group will be meeting on Thursday 23 October at 14:00-15:00 (room LG03, Teaching and Learning Building) to discuss ‘Exploring Julia language for Python users’, with guest speaker Dan Sherrington. Please register to attend via the Microsoft Form.
If you’re using Julia as a programming language or would like to, you may also be interested in the provision of a new dedicated repository to share educational resources related to Julia. Find out more and how to access it via the Julia repository blog post.
MATLAB Special Interest Group relaunch
On the afternoon of Wednesday 26 November, the MATLAB Special Interest Group will be holding a relaunch event. Featuring keynote presentations by our new Chair, Dagmar Fraser from Psychology, and MathWorks, this session will give researchers the opportunity to hear more about MATLAB use across the University. There will also be an optional hands-on workshop. You can sign up to attend here.
Linking articles on Pure with BEAR services
Did you know that Pure (the University of Birmingham’s Current Research Information System) is able to show how much research activity is supported by BEAR services? You can help to develop this data by adding relations between your outputs, activities, projects, etc. In order to do this you will need to add BEAR as a facility to your research output, see the Pure and BEAR SharePoint page for further advice.
Opportunities to present at Computing Insight UK (CIUK2025)
There are currently two opportunities to present at the national supercomputing conference, Computing Insight UK (CIUK2025), at Manchester on 4-5 December for students (undergraduate through to postgraduate research) and early career researchers using High Performance Computing in their research. Accepted presenters will receive free registration for the conference, which had 1,000 exhibitors and attendees last year:
- Women in HPC – call for lightning talks (deadline Monday 27 October)
- Poster competition (deadline Friday 14 November)
Case study on Nano-org – a Research Software Group collaboration with researchers in Immunology & Immunotherapy
In this month’s featured case study, we highlight an ongoing collaboration between the Research Software Group, Professor Dylan Owen, and Dr Sandeep Shirgill (Immunology and Immunotherapy) in the development of Nano-org, recently published in Nature Communications. The team have made extensive use of the computational resources provided by BlueBEAR to successfully transform complex research concepts into efficient, user-friendly software. Have a read of the Nano-org case study to find out more.
BEAR drop-in session dates
We are currently holding monthly in-person drop-in sessions on the first Wednesday of the month at 13:30-14:30 on the first floor of Staff House (formerly Café Aroma). We also provide additional virtual drop-in sessions via Zoom for those not on campus or who require specialist help – check the drop-in webpage for updates, as well as details on how to join the sessions. Currently scheduled dates are also listed below:
- In-person – Tuesday 21 October, 11:00-13:00 – Staff Benefits Fair, Great Hall
- In-person – Wednesday 5 November, 13:30-14:30 – Staff House, first floor (look for our banner)
- Via Zoom – Friday 14 November, 10:00-11:00
- Via Zoom – Thursday 20 November, 13:30-14:30
- Via Zoom – Tuesday 25 November, 11:00-12:00
- In-person – Wednesday 3 December, 13:30-14:30 – Staff House, first floor (look for our banner)
Missed last month’s newsletter?
Find September’s newsletter here. Sign up to receive the newsletter direct to your inbox by joining our bear-updates mailing list here (UoB login required), or ask to join via email at bearinfo@contacts.bham.ac.uk