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By Paul Mignone, Dejan Jotanovic & Dr. Colin Burvill
It’s been a long time coming and now it’s here! The first (of many) dedicated Computer-Aided Design (CAD) training workshops for engineering students at the University of Melbourne. For those that don’t know. CAD is a piece of software allowing you to design and modify your own 2D or 3D Computer-Aided Design (it’s really all in the name). Users are enabled to sharpen the quality of their designs, establish databases and record their progress through documentation.
But the fun of CAD is watching your 3D model come to life…enter 3D Printing. Letting your 3D model gather dust seems like too much of a waste when considering that the University of Melbourne’s Engineering Workshop houses around ten beautiful 3D Printers. So, you may ask, what are the possibilities?
CAD helps you unleash your inner designer! (Source)
Between CAD and 3D Printing, the possibilities are endless. Do you love to skate? Why not print your own skateboard? Broken hand? 3D Printing has you (or perhaps it) covered. CAD modeling & printing has even been successful in building a woman’s hip! For engineering students, this class will get you started on developing a highly valuable skill set for your engineering or research careers. These skills will also be handy when designing models for your Warman (MCEN30014), gearbox (MCEN90013), mechatronic design (MCEN90024) and Capstone (MCEN90022) projects, as well as any models you need to 3D print.
CAD animation of a Subaru EJ25 engine (Source)
The first classes will be taught using Solidworks, and will be held on Saturdays (9am - 5pm) in the Alice Hoy building. Please select one of the links below to register. Please note that you MUST be a University of Melbourne Engineering student or staff member to register. In the first instance, priority will be given to students within the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Thanks to the fantastic efforts of Dr. Colin Burvill, the Melbourne School of Engineering and ITS research services, we can finally say: Yes, we can! Yes, we CAD!
By Katie Ewing & Dejan Jotanovic
See bottom of this post for registration details for #C15Hack!!!
We here at ResPlat love hackathons (as Fiona so passionately explained why), so we were eager to jump on board when we heard about the #C14Hack at the University of Melbourne.
The #C14Hack was birthed from a group of students from the Postgraduate Environment Network (PEN) and the Ecopreneurs. As Friedrich, one of the hackathon’s organisers, explains in the video below, the #C14Hack is an eco-innovation workshop aimed at hacking five very real sustainability problems on campus: organic waste, solid waste, biodiversity, energy efficiency, and policy change.
Over a day and a half, participants worked in teams to generate ideas and develop solutions using unconventional problem-solving techniques (think gamification). Each group presented their pitch in front of the judging panel, which included our own Fiona Tweedie. The judging criteria included environmental impact reduction, feasibility, scalability, enterprisability, and innovation. You can watch all the three-minute pitches here!
Here are the #C14hack judges! @FCTweedie @MatthewWillcox and Natalie Jamieson. pic.twitter.com/nYJ54iBvI8
— ITS Research (@ITS_Res)
May 9, 2014
The winners of the $500 grand prize were ultimately the Organic Waste group! Check out their winning interview below:
The #C14Hack provided students with a unique opportunity to work on real environmental issues on campus while showing them a different way of problem solving. As one of the participants said, “We came out of it with a ton of research and a real desire to make our project happen for real.” Now that is what we are all about - making research exciting and practical!
#C15Hack is happening this year - on May 4th & 5th! Register here: www.c15hack.eventbrite.com.au
Your solution may even spark a start-up idea that you can pitch at the Melbourne Accelerator Program. Happy Hacking!
If you say ‘hackathon’ to people outside the tech community, they’ll often assume that you’re proposing something not quite legal. They are, of course, mistaken. In the context of a hackathon, ‘hack’ refers back to its earlier meaning, which is to play or to look for shortcuts and quick solutions to tackle a challenge. Typically, hackathons are timed competitions (often 48 hours, but sometimes shorter) where teams and individuals compete to create something that solves a problem or exemplifies a theme. There’s a bit of a cliché now, that hackathons are the domain of awkward males with computers fuelled with energy drinks and pizza. There’s an element of truth to this, but the culture is changing to be more diverse and inclusive. And this is where GovHack comes in.
GovHack is a huge, nation-wide hackathon that will be happening in July. Last year, it happened in eight cities around the country and the number has grown to eleven in 2014. GovHack asks competitors to see what they can make using data supplied by government agencies. A huge variety is available from all levels of government across many different themes. And this is why researchers should come along. GovHack attracts a crowd with great technical skills in analysing and visualising data and building apps and websites. But a truly great hack doesn’t only look amazing, it answers a need or a question. Researchers from all sorts of disciplines have questions that could be answered with government data – whether they work in public policy or health, history and culture, economics or urban planning. GovHack even has specific prizes for digital humanities and data journalism projects.
ResCom and GovHack local organiser Fiona Tweedie talks GovHack at the recent Open Government Partnership conference in Indonesia
If you’re a researcher interested in Australian life and culture, GovHack needs you! Don’t think that because you don’t code on weekends you don’t belong. Jo Hawkins, a Western Australian historian, has blogged about her GovHack experiences and the importance of researchers. Researchers bring the questions that focus the hacks and give them purpose, lifting them from a display of skill to something compelling and truly valuable. So for a challenging, stimulating and mind-expanding weekend, come along to Melbourne GovHack, 11- 13 July.
Book here – if you have any questions or if you need extra tickets, contact Fiona.
By Damien Irving.
Most people are familiar with Mozilla because they’ve used the Firefox web browser. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll discover that Mozilla is actually a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible. One of their coolest projects (in my opinion) is the Mozilla Science Lab, whose goal is to use the power of the open web to change the way science is done. Software Carpentry is part of the Mozilla Science Lab, so if you’ve ever been to one of our bootcamps you’ve directly benefited from the great work the Lab is doing, possibly without even knowing it!
“Software Carpentry, engagement and scaling our efforts” - a look at plans moving forward: http://t.co/QRkKbSZu6n @swcarpentry #openscience
— Mozilla Science Lab (@MozillaScience)
May 20, 2014
On July 22-23, the Mozilla Science Lab will host their first ever Global Sprint. Based on the Random Hacks of Kindness initiative, this event will see people from all around the globe ‘hacking’ on the Software Carpentry teaching materials for two days straight. Following the global timezones, the event will start in Australia and New Zealand. As our day comes to an end Europe will be waking up, so we’ll hand-off to groups in Paris, London and Edinburgh. They’ll then pass-on to people in North America (New York, Toronto, Vancouver, San Fransisco, etc), who will hand-off to us on the morning of the 23rd for a second lap around the planet.
A short FAQ about our sprint on July 22-23: http://t.co/YdwYvu593v
— Software Carpentry (@swcarpentry)
July 8, 2014
Since many people in the Research Bazaar community are involved (or would like to be involved) in teaching Software Carpentry, we’ve put our hand up to be one of the Australian host sites for the sprint. We’ll be working on producing “capstone examples” for specific research disciplines, reviewing new lesson materials that people have been working on around the world, and even developing some new lessons of our own. If you’d like to attend for some or all of the two-days, the details are below. You should also add your name to the event Etherpad so we know who’s coming. See you in July!
Mozilla Science Lab Global Sprint - Melbourne site
9am - 5pm
July 22 - 23
ITS Research Services Meeting Space (Room 322)
Doug McDonell Building
University of Melbourne
Research can be 'bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s 'Research Community Coordinator’, who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers. Here’s the full list.
By: Steve Bennett
Do you have a small database of interesting information that you want to publish to the world? Omeka might be the answer. Its original design goals were to offer a simple, open-source collection management platform for small libraries and museums. It’s very good at image management, but happily manages other things, like records of books, events, people, websites - or anything you can name, really.
Amanda Trevisanut, a recently-submitted PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, had this kind of problem. Her spreadsheets are a comprehensive history of the productions of SBS independent, a TV production company, going back to 1994.
With a fresh Omeka install on the NeCTAR Research Cloud, we used the CSV import plugin to map the columns of the spreadsheet onto item elements.
A wee bit of fiddling around later, and, our first draft is ready. This is what an item looks like to the public:
The public can browse, search, explore tags and even more with lots of plugins on offer.
It’s completely skinnable, so if this theme isn’t your thing, there are others to choose from - or customise it with the help of a web designer.
If you think Omeka might solve a problem for you, please get in touch!
When we talk about ‘open’ culture, technology is often the first thing that comes to mind – open source projects like Linux, Libre Office or Mozilla’s Firefox. But ‘open’ is a much bigger movement than software and you’ll particularly hear it mentioned around data. Governments, for instance, are increasingly making data available to the community via sites such as data.gov.au. Making this data available serves a number of purposes. It increases transparency in government and allows people to verify what they’re being told. For instance, much of the data from the recent federal budget is now available for analysis. You mightn’t like what the government is doing, but access to the data means that you can check the numbers for yourself and should mean that the whole community can have a better informed debate.
But how does this relate to researchers? Like government data, a lot of the data collected by researchers in universities is ultimately funded by the public, which means that the same arguments around the public’s right to access apply. Publishing research data is about much more than ideology, however. By making their research data available along with their findings, researchers allow others in their field to verify their results and build on their work. Professor Matthew Todd, for instance, conducts essential research on malaria that extensively reuses data collected by other researchers. Allowing reuse of data means that the return on the resources invested in collecting it in the first place is increased. In fact, funding bodies are increasingly requiring publicly funded research to make the data available for reuse.
Listen to Dr Fiona Tweedie and Dr Maia Sauren of the Open Knowledge Foundation talk all things open with Byte Into IT on 3RRR (from 21 minutes).
Here at the Research Bazaar, we think a lot about how we can showcase the world-class research that happens here at Melbourne University, and how we can get researchers using the right tools to get the most out of data – whether they’ve collected it themselves or are reusing data collected previously. There will be more here on reuse of research data in the coming months, but for now you might like to check out HealthHack.
HealthHack was an event of the Open Knowledge Foundation that ran in Melbourne in October 2013. It will be on again in October 2014 nationally! Over the weekend, medical researchers with huge amounts of data came together with experts in data analysis and visualisation. The teams worked closely with the researchers to create tools that would not only be useful to the researchers but are open for use and adaptation by the broader research community.
Researchers all dream of a ‘world first’ and need to protect their work while it’s in progress. In some fields, such as medical research, patient confidentiality also means that whole datasets can’t simply be made freely available online. But increasingly we’re seeing that applying the principles of openness and encouraging reuse enables richer research, helps the funding dollar go further, and ultimately makes for better outcomes for the whole community.
By Katie Ewing
Have you ever dealt with a spreadsheet so large (say, on the order of billions of entries) that it couldn’t even be opened in Microsoft Excel? This is a common problem for computational biologists who investigate the cause of diseases by looking for a change of a single DNA base in a huge gene. Luckily, there’s a tool that can help make sense of all that data. Galaxy is a web-based platform designed for data intensive biomedical research, making large data sets more accessible and reproducible. It runs as part of the Genomics Virtual Lab (GVL) on the Australian Research Cloud.
Over two days in April, the first Galaxy in the Cloud training course was held at the University of Melbourne, in collaboration with VLSCI, HABIC, and ITS Research. Participants were instructed how to launch instances on the cloud so that they can work with large data sets without using up resources on their individual machines. Researchers learned to create workflows to analyze their own data, while system administrators learned how to administer Galaxy so that they could take it back to their respective institutions.
Interviewing researchers at the Galaxy training session @ITS_Res @galaxyproject. Interesting projects in the works!! pic.twitter.com/qRtywpNntx
— Dejan (@heyDejan)
April 3, 2014
Dejan talks to Ashley and Miriam from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI) about their research
So how does genomics data typically flow? A clinician will meet a patient who has a genetic disease such as Parkinson’s or autism. He or she will collect a sample of the patient’s DNA and then send it off to get sequenced using next generation (“next gen”) sequencing, which enables the whole genome sequence to be read digitally (meaning quickly!). A bioinformatician will sort through the DNA bases and send the organised data back to the biologist, who is then able to identify the specific mutation that is causing the disease.
With next gen sequencing becoming more and more common, researchers are wanting to understand what exactly is IN the “black box” that they’re sending their data through. Galaxy is the bridge, or common language, between the biologists in the wet lab and the bioinformaticians in the dry lab. As one participant said, it’s not about reinventing the wheel; it’s just about learning how to use it.
Is this necessary? Probably not.
Data is more than just an Excel spreadsheet. It takes powerful yet user-friendly tools, such as Galaxy, to produce and share world-class research that ultimately leads to new discoveries.
Ready to learn more? Stay tuned for upcoming Galaxy Workshops!
By Damien Irving.
At the beginning of 2013, I was part of an organising team that hosted the first ever Software Carpentry bootcamps outside of North America and Europe. Our events in Sydney and Melbourne were a great success, so I gave a presentation at PyCon 2013 in Hobart to try and generate some ongoing interest in Australia (see clip below). In that presentation I was fairly bullish about Software Carpentry’s future prospects, however I couldn’t possibly have anticipated just how popular the bootcamps would become. In 2013 there were more than 100 bootcamps hosted in 12 different countries for over 4000 researchers, and those numbers are expected to increase by at least 50% in 2014. What’s more, we’ve now hosted over 10 bootcamps in Australia and there are many more on the way in the coming months.
Naturally, I attribute most of Software Carpentry’s success to my presentation at PyCon 2013. I’m therefore very excited to be attending PyCon 2014 in Brisbane, where I’ll be participating in a number of Software Carpentry related activities. First and foremost, myself, Philipp Bayer and Tim McNamara will be teaching a two-day bootcamp at the University of Queensland on the Wednesday and Thursday prior to conference (July 30-31; see here for details). Tim Dettrick (#ResBaz lead developer and all round programming guru) will also attend as a helper/tutor, which is great news for the bootcamp participants.
If you’re attending @PyConAu, why not extend your stay and come to this @swcarpentry bootcamp at @UQ_News… http://t.co/hMReCE2adb
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
June 10, 2014
I’ll then give a presentation at the main PyCon conference about Software Carpentry. My talk will focus on the lessons we’ve learned teaching basic software skills to researchers, before turning to future plans and directions for our activities in Australia. In particular, I’ll be announcing the various Software Carpentry things we’ll be doing at the Research Bazaar conference in February next year. This is going to be a massive event - we’d love to see you there as a participant and/or as part of our Software Carpentry teaching team!
Research can be ‘bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s 'Research Community Coordinator’, who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers. Here’s the full list.
By Damien Irving & Katie Ewing
As the popularity of Software Carpentry has grown in recent years, people have naturally begun to ask, “instead of teaching programming best practices using Python or R, could you please run some bootcamps using Matlab instead?” That’s a fair enough request, so earlier this year the first ever Matlab bootcamp was held at the University of Manchester. The event was a great success, so the developers at Matlab HQ (aka MathWorks) decided to write up the teaching materials and make them freely available for others to use.
More about our Manchester MATLAB bootcamp from Mike Croucher: http://t.co/ms8K9EHXdM (apologies for typo in earlier tweet)
— Software Carpentry (@swcarpentry)
January 28, 2014
Many of the researchers we work with use Matlab, so we eagerly snapped up the materials as soon as they were released. We then called in a favour from Abhaya Parthy, who is an Application Engineer at MathWorks in Sydney. Abhaya was very keen to help us run our own Matlab bootcamp, so he spent an afternoon with our Matlab teaching team, bringing them up to speed on both the new teaching materials and the latest features in Matlab.
The new @swcarpentry #matlab materials are much easier to learn with chocolate cake - thanks @katieaewing! @ITS_Res pic.twitter.com/2houjTfGc6
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
May 7, 2014
Registrations for our first ever Matlab bootcamp are now open, so checkout the bootcamp website if you’d like to come along. If you already know a fair bit about Matlab, perhaps you’d like to join our Matlab teaching team? Katie promises that she’ll make chocolate cake for all our meetings… ;-)
Matlab #SWCARPENTRY training here we come @ITS_Res pic.twitter.com/9brIUi7Pzw
— David F. Flanders (@dfflanders)
May 7, 2014
Research can be ‘bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s 'Research Community Coordinator’, who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers. Here’s the full list.
By Paul Mignone
On Friday morning last week, I had the fantastic opportunity to discuss the future of 3D printing with Rod Quinn on the ABC overnights radio program. It was 4am, and while most sane people were either still in bed or on their way to work, myself and Rod discussed the good, the bad and the future of 3D printing technology.
Image Property of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
From firearms to organs. From aircraft to consumer products. Myself and Rod covered a broad array of topics, while answering questions from curious listeners. If you missed the interview, you can access it here on our very own ResBaz channel.
Enjoy!
By Paul Mignone
We at ResBaz had a nostalgic moment earlier this week. Michael Wang, a #ResBaz original, and now NVIDIA’s solutions architect for Australia and New Zealand, returned to his old ‘stomping ground’ to host Melbourne’s premier GPU user’s group. It’s been nearly a year since the last GPU meetup, and it recommenced with Mike giving a great summary of the highlights for this years GPU Technology Conference (GTC).
Welcome Back!
For those that weren’t able to make the the meetup, I strongly recommend viewing the GTC keynote speech (below) as it will be 100 minutes well spent. For me personally, the highlight of both Mike’s talk and Jen-Hsun keynote speech, was the recent success of NVIDIA’s and Stanford University’s collaboration to create the world’s largest artificial neural network. This network was built for modelling how the human brain learns.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivering the keynote speech (Video streaming by Ustream)
The original ’Google Brain’ artificial intelligence system used to model human learning, consisted of 1000 CPU servers (i.e., 16,000 cores), costed USD 5,000,000 to build and consumed over 600 kWatts of power. The new Stanford AI lab used only 3 servers, which contained 12 NVIDIA GPUs (i.e., 18,432 CUDA cores), costing only USD 33,000 and consuming only 4 kWatts of power. When viewing cost and power savings of this magnitude, it’s no surprise that the top 10 Green 500 supercomputers are powered by GPUs. Australia’s very own CSIRO also makes the top 10 in this list, with it’s GPU cluster crunching 2,358 MFLOPS per watt.
The stats say it all…(Image Source)
In recent times, both the GPU computing and 3D printing movements have picked up some striking similarities. First, both technologies have come down significantly in cost, allowing more consumers and researchers to access the technology. Just like 3D printing, access to GPUs can give researches the ability to reduce both the cost and time to achieve their research objectives (e.g., publications). Second, the learning curve in using these technologies are becoming progressively shallow, with GPU libraries and compilers available for high-level programming languages such as Python and Matlab.
A world first? #3dprinting from the #cloud https://t.co/ubkE3036sa #nvidia #gridforums #gpu
— Mike Wang (@mikepcw)
April 28, 2014
The technologies are also set for a collision course of epic delight for both businesses and consumers. In the following post, Mike describes an experiment using an NVIDIA GRID-accelerated virtual desktop session where users can not only create 3D CAD models, but they can also send those models directly to a 3D printer from the cloud without having to save to a physical storage medium (e.g. a USB thumb drive). For those that are interested in hearing more about this technology, I strongly recommend joining the Melbourne’s GPU user's group. It’s fast approaching the 100 members milestone, and will be awarding prizes to celebrate this fantastic achievement.