The crème de la crème of research apps

By David Flanders

Here at UniMelb we’ve been working on a project focused on migrating research apps into the national .EU.AU cloud (funded by NeCTAR).  NeCTAR have asked to share why we have selected the following apps for researchers.  We hope that this post will help encourage our fellow NeCTAR cloud projects to talk about the cool stuff they are doing with the cloud so that we can leverage the full collaborative researcher potential.

How are we picking the best research apps? - Early on, we came up with the following key selection criteria: a.) demonstrable researcher lead demand for the tool, b.) sustainability via research community participation, c.) breadth of use across our campus, d.) technical feasibility and e.) economic feasibility and/or business case.

Based on this list we started approaching our various ‘research precincts’ as per this color-coded campus map:

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[University of Melbourne Precinct Campus Map]

From a sample of our ten-thousand researchers, we quickly discovered that the research tools our researchers want are primarily discipline based; even where tools such as Matlab or #Rstat are used in multiple schools, the use of the tool is very different per research usage (e.g. customising R with CRAN plugin tools effectively makes R a different tool for each subject area).  In support of our qualitative approach, we were pleased to see our fellow cloud node [1] in South Australia, eResearch SA, discover similar findings through their quantitative survey:


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[eResearch SA 2013, The eResearch Landscape 2013: A Snapshot, By Sarah Nisbet and Jarrad Greenham, Adelaide, South Australia]

Which brings us to the first lesson we feel we can share with our fellow research cloud #appsmigration projects: To engage researchers in the use of the cloud we must provide discipline specific tools which groups of co-located researchers can use (with a shared sample of discipline specific data if possible).

Accordingly, the following is our current list of research groups whom we are going to engage in the communal use of cloud apps (priority list subject to change):

“Low hanging fruit apps” aka priority research apps list for migrating to the cloud:

1. Neuroscience with iPython (SciPy) and/or Matlab through ‘Software Carpentry’ methods.

  • Usability Engineer: Damien Irving and Katie Ewing
  • Developer: Russell Sim, (scoping potential work with Aptira)

2. Biosciences with the use of iPython/RStat through ‘Software Carpentry’ methods.

3. Engineering with the use of an HTML5 CAD browser (like 3DTin?) through 3D Printing “Digital Blacksmith” methodologies.

NB: As you can see by the above, we are focusing on what we are calling ‘data intensive tools’, which we define as tools for data larger or more complex than what a spreadsheet can handle.

“Back-burner” apps list (we hope to get around to these during the course of the project, no promises, but any collaborative partners out there welcome!):

4. Government (Social Science) with Rstat via the use of Rstudio through Software Carpentry methodologies

5. Genomics/Bioinformatics with use of Galaxy training via VLSCI.

  • Usability Engineer: Guillermo Lopez (HABIC) & Claire Sloggett (VLSCI)
  • Developer: Nuwan Goonasekera (VLSCI)

6. Arts (Cultural Communications) using a tool like ?Tableau? for doing visualisations and infographics:

7. Social Sciences using a tool like ?NVivo/TSense? for doing word analysis?

TileMill, a cloud app successfully run as part of our ‘Mapping for Academics’ training bootcamp, demonstrates the value of the above approach. In fact, we are pleased to say that Cathy Miller, at the University of Adelaide, has already repeated the TileMill course. Just recently we’ve also been made aware of two research papers published utilising TileMill to create their own custom maps.

We are thus actively looking at expanding this ‘Mapping for Academics’ platform with additional tools like CartoDB and other mapping tools, as well as welcoming any partner institutions looking to use our open source apps and creative commons training material. Please get in touch!

#!= Yay! we’ve just been made aware of two research papers published utilising TileMill to create maps for the research paper. #win 

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Research can be ‘bazaar’… so we’re here to help!Flick us a tweet (here, or here), 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.

The Research Bazaar is a campaign by the University of Melbourne’s central IT Services Researcher department to engage researchers in the digital apps they need to produce world-class research.  Read our #ResBaz mission statement here.

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[1]= The National Research Cloud is made up of eight higher education institutions who are on course to create the largest federated research cloud in the world.