The agreement forming the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy has been renewed by the universities of Cape Town, the Western Cape and Pretoria for a period of five years. The institute is the main place for South African university researchers to process the very large data sets coming from the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope.
The University of Cape Town (UCT) recently joined the Digital Preservation Coalition, a global community that seeks to secure the preservation of digital resources internationally in order to safeguard the global digital memory and knowledge base for the future.
Open science has many benefits including improved access to research outputs, greater global collaboration and reducing duplication in scientific efforts.
UCT’s new HPC cluster was installed and operational in January 2019 and continues to provide a reliable, scalable and economic computing facility for researchers. The upgraded facility provides an HPC cluster geared towards researchers with major computing needs but is also accessible to the full community, for both teaching and research.
Dr Chris Barnett has invested in the research cloud-computing platform ilifu to create a central resource where a like-minded research community can come together and share these tools and expertise, using the opensource platform Galaxy.
Professor Catherine Ward of UCT's Department of Psychology is working on the South African piece of an eight-country longitudinal birth-cohort study led by Cambridge University which seeks to understand violence against children. UCT eResearch worked with Ward to help her anticipate and resolve the many research data problems that are likely to crop up during the course of the study.
Big data has changed the world forever – just ask Netflix. But, argues Professor Ulrike Rivett in her keynote address at eResearch Africa 2019, when it comes to society, public sector and government big data is perhaps not the silver bullet we imagine.
In the digital age, information is a commodity that criminals will go to great lengths to get their hands on. Research data is no different. Roshan Harneker, Senior Manager for Information and Cybersecurity Services at Information, Communication and Technology Services (ICTS) offers a few key points to bear in mind to maintain the integrity of your research data.
The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the CSIR are pleased to announce the DST CSIR Inter-bursary Support Programme (IBS) call for applications.
Earlier this year Professor Tandi Matsha was awarded the NSTF Data for Research Award at the National Science and Technology Foundation-South32 Awards – dubbed the ‘Oscars of Science’ – for her work in identifying cardio-metabolic risk factors in South African populations of mixed ancestry and making that data available for re-use through the CPUT instance of Figshare, funded through the ilifu project.