You can find the presentation for this JACS session here!

Do you think that 'the terminal' is a 2004 hit film starring Tom Hanks? Or a portal to another dimension? Does a 'super user' sound like a really bad name for a superhero? Does running 'rm -rf --no-preserve-root /' sound like a good idea to you (PLEASE DO NOT RUN THIS!)? Then this JACS session is for you! Learn the essential Linux commands to help you with your daily activities. Linux might feel a bit difficult and unfamiliar at first, but even after this short session you should be comfortable with managing your files, dealing with some minor software issues and solving some small problems, such as desktop icons disappearing for no reason at all.

George Bendo, 10.10.2019

You can find the slides for this presentation here!

This talk will review several topics related to paper writing. I will first review LaTeX, which is the mark-up language used for professional paper writing. I will then describe the typical outline of an astronomy paper. I then conclude with some writing tips and some discussion on the practical aspects of publishing a paper.

Mateusz Malenta, 17.10.2019

You can find the slides for this presentation here!

In this session I will cover the best practices and options for making sure your work is safely backed up and up-to-date. I will introduce the general idea of version control systems and the benefits of using git for this task. I will cover the basic terminology, such as branching, merging, forking, etc. and all the essential commands to start using git for your projects. I will also discuss various hosting options and GUIs that can help you to quickly integrate git into your project without the need for learning new commands and using the command line interface.

Josh Hayes and David Whitworth, 24.10.2019

Unfortunately this session was cancelled. We will endeavour to reschedule this session if possible.

JBCA is known for our excellent outreach and participation, Josh will give us an introduction to the many outreach and science communication opportunities available while you're at JBCA and part of the University of Manchester. David will give us an overview of the world-renowned Bluedot festival, and our involvement in it.

Anthony Holloway, 31.10.2019

What is high performance computing? How do you queue up a job? How do you ssh into another machine? Ant will answer these questions and more when he tells us about High Performance Computing and using the clusters available to you as a JBCA PG student.

When you need more power than your desktop can provide, the next place to look is High Performance Computing. The session will look at what facilities we have available at JBCA and to what purposes they are dedicated.

We will look at the methods and issues involved in moving from a serial code to a parallel code and how that can speed up your processing. There will also be a look at what options you have if your processing outgrows the JBCA facilities.

Alex Clarke, 07.11.2019

You can find a link to Alex's slides here!

I will give an overview of the basic practices and techniques used in data science. I'll introduce the basics of machine learning, and show the kinds of situations where it can help you with your science. I'll give a whirlwind tour of some of the most used machine learning algorithms - mainly giving you a basis from which you can go and learn about them in detail yourself. I'll show some of the best ways to use python to implement machine learning algorithms, and some of the best practices when using python to work with large data sets. Maybe I'll also convince you to move away from Jupyter notebooks for anything other than basic data exploration and quick (~day) projects or hacks.

Useful links:

• Google machine learning course
• JBCA Machine Learning club
  • JBCA ML Club github
• Sklearn documentation
• Jupyter videos and blogs
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U
  • https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/coding-habits-data-scientists

Rachael Ainsworth, 14.11.2019

You can find the link to Rachael's slides here.

Making research results more accessible and reproducible can contribute to better and more efficient science, however widespread adoption of open research practices has not yet been achieved. Funding agencies (such as the European Commission Horizon 2020 and UKRI) are increasingly requiring research products (such as data and publications) to be made openly available in order to make results more accessible, transparent and reproducible. Recent studies have also shown that open research practices are associated with benefits to the researcher such as increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job and funding opportunities. In this talk I will discuss the different aspects of Open Science, the barriers we face to practicing openly, how to improve reproducibility in your research workflow using open and transparent data and software services in order to reap the benefits associated with open research practices, and highlight current open projects in Astrophysics.

Adam Avison, 21.11.2019

You can find the slides for this talk here, and the Pynterferometer here.

Abstract:

In the era of ALMA, LOFAR, JVLA and the upcoming SKA the cutting edge of radio and mm astronomy is based on interferometric observations. In this JACS session Adam will give a whistle stop tour of why we build interferometers, how they work and a background to interferometric data processing.

Richards Rollins, 28.11.2019

Abstract:

This session will provide an overview of OpenMP as a tool for shared-memory multiprocessing in C, C++ and Fortran. We will demonstrate how to parallelise existing serial code through a series of simple worked examples before discussing some more advanced features including task parallelism, SIMD parallelism, accelerator offloading and the MPI+OpenMP hybrid model.

Ian Harrison, 05.12.2019

Astronomers are well-known for sticking to what we know when it comes to statistics (*cough* reduced chi-squared *cough*), Ian will help us move past that by teaching us a bit about Bayesian Statistics.