Event schedule

Break

Lunch

To Be Announced

Managing Research Data

An overview of research data management requirements, practices, tools and support across the research data lifecycle. Research data or artefatcs are defined as items created, collected or observed in the course of producing original research, regardless of format. This introductory workshop is aimed at researchers, particularly those embarking on their research career or starting a new research project. Attendees will hear about policy, legal and ethical requirements, the FAIR, CARE and Maori Data Sovereignty principles, and develop strategies for data management planning, capturing, organising, sharing, and reusing research data.

Jupyter notebooks for reproducible research

Jupyter Notebooks are a powerful interactive tool that can help you develop and practice your coding skills (especially in Python and Markdown), build reproducible and shareable outputs and easily present the results of your work. This session will discuss some of the pros and cons of using Jupyter Notebooks and give you a chance to follow along and make your first steps in using the tool yourself.

NVivo for Literature Reviews

Reviewing the literature is an important part of the research process. Organising relevant papers and findings are more than just data entry or bibliographic tasks, you also need to be able to analyse and integrate this material with the qualitative data you are gathering. This one-hour demonstration will provide an overview of NVivo’s functionality with regard to literature reviews. Importing and coding literature, running queries on published material, and working with bibliographic data in conjunction with your NVivo project will all be covered.

Introduction to Cleaning & Transforming Data with OpenRefine

OpenRefine is a powerful, free, open-source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. This introductory, practical workshop will demonstrate how it can help you to: Understand the structure of a data set and resolve inconsistencies; Split data up into more granular parts; Match local data up to other data sets; Enhance a data set with data from other sources. Setup instructions can be found here

How Can Python Help Your Research?

New to the Python programming language and interested in how it can help your research? Then this intro session is for you! No prior knowledge of Python required, no hands-on coding involved, just sit back with your favourite beverage and find out about the powerful world of Python. The session is split into 2 parts. Part 1: A holistic overview of Python. Key concepts in Python, how Python is used around the world, and how Python can help you organise, analyse, and visualise your research data. Part 2: Getting started with Python for research. A live demonstration of how to start using Python to investigate research data, including: how to load in a spreadsheet of data, basic manipulation and processing of the data, how to quickly visualise the data to reveal insights into the dataset, and a bunch of useful links to help you launch your journey into using Python.

Build a Research Portfolio Website (Using GitHub)

Learn how to create an attractive, functional website to showcase your research career and outputs using GitHub and wowchemy. Some familiarity with git, HTML and CSS will be beneficial, but not necessary. Setup instructions can be found here

Research Data Collection & Surveys with REDCap: An Overview

A brief overview of REDCap, a software tool which can help you create and manage research databases and participant surveys, including those containing sensitive data.

Open Access: How to Make Your Publications Open

Open Access to publications and other research outputs ensures you get maximum exposure and recognition for your work. Open publications are viewed, downloaded, and cited at higher rates than closed publications. There are free ways to make your work open regardless of where you publish, so you don't have to publish in OA journals or pay steep publication fees to enjoy the benefits of OA. In this one-hour workshop you'll learn how to make your publications open for free while respecting copyright and publisher agreements.

Strategic Publishing: Deciding Where to Publish & Understanding the Process

Confused about where you should publish your research? Want to make sure you’re publishing in credible journals? Want to learn more about the publishing process? In this session we’ll cover publishing strategies to maximise the impact of your research and provide an overview of the publishing and peer review process so you know what to expect.

Using Researcher Profiles & LinkedIn to Promote You and Your Research

Trying to work that academic hustle, but don’t know how to get your name out there? Wondering about the best way to promote your research or track your publications? In this workshop, we’ll discuss the reasons why research profiles are important, look at the different types of profiles and their purposes, and brainstorm some strategies to help you manage your online identities. This will help doctoral candidates and early career researchers (ECRs) set the stage for their future research career.

Managing References With Zotero

Researchers spend a lot of time capturing, organising, and consulting sources, so it makes sense to use a good reference manager. Zotero is a free open-source reference manager built by researchers for researchers. It is simple to learn, yet powerful and feature-rich, and will save you countless hours when wrangling your sources. In this two hour workshop you'll learn how to use Zotero to capture, organise, and cite your references when you need them. Setup instructions can be found here

Design 101: Presentations, Posters, and PowerPoints for Researchers

Why are you here? What are you presenting? Who are you presenting to? No, this is not the abstract for “Existentialism with Nietzsche”, it’s “Design 101: Presentations, Posters, and PowerPoints for Researchers”! Have you ever seen a research poster or a PowerPoint presentation that was truly terrible and thought, “Wow, I wonder how I could salvage that? I wonder how I can make research approachable through attractive design?” In this session, we will give you tips on what makes good visual design for research. We will walk you through the do’s (and some don’ts) and what to consider when putting together a visual research presentation, whether a poster, a PowerPoint slideshow, or another type of medium.

Introduction to R and RStudio

R is a free and widely used programming language for data analysis and statistics. This workshop aims to introduce you to the R programming language, and RStudio - free software used to work with R. We will cover the most important parts of using R including working with data and creating beautiful plots. There will be hands-on exercises for you to practice R coding and we will share tips-and-tricks to help you start your R journey with confidence! Setup instructions can be found here

Introduction to the Command Line

The Unix shell is a powerful command-line interface and scripting language which can automate repetitive tasks. The Unix philosophy is that each tool (command) should perform just one task, and perform it well. Learning the command-line is learning how to exploit these tools and compose them to perform tasks that you can find no satisfactory single tool to perform. Along the way, you will learn how to choose appropriate commands for your tasks and develop an understanding of how the command line can help you to save time. Bash is the default shell on most modern implementations of Unix and in most packages that provide Unix-like tools for Windows. This session will use the command-line bash shell to introduce you to the basics, as far as time permits, of how to: * navigate the file-system * read, write, and modify files * parse data from and to files * create custom re-usable commands in the form of aliases, shell functions and shell scripts * automate repetitive tasks Setup instructions can be found here

What is the Julia Programming Language and is it Right for Me?

Julia is a relatively new but exciting, multi-purpose programming language, with increasing adoption among scientific researchers. Interaction with Julia closely resembles that of scripting languages, such as R, MATLAB and python, and a growing number of Julia libraries provide similar functionality for scientific computation. However, extending modifying, or creating new software in these older languages is complicated as all performance critical code must be written in a second, low-level language, like C or FORTRAN, which are more technically demanding, and are slower to test, debug, etc. Julia's careful and elegant design solves this two language problem. In this presentation and Q&A session, find out if Julia is a good match for your research project.

Introduction to Using Julia for Machine Learning

A hands-on, gentle introduction to using the Julia programming language and the MLJ library for machine learning. The basic workflow for training a supervised learning model will be explained, and users will build a basic decision tree model to predict survival probabilities in a hypothetical repeat of the historic Titanic disaster. MLJ (https://alan-turing-institute.github.io/MLJ.jl/dev/) is a powerful toolbox for quickly selecting, optimizing and comparing diverse machine learning models (as opposed to to frameworks focused on, say, deep learning). Advanced features include the ability to create model pipelines and to combine multiple model predictions in flexible ways.This is a tutorial on how to use the MLJ software, and not a course on machine learning itself. Setup instructions can be found here

Getting Started With the Julia Programming Language

A two-hour introductory workshop for newcomers to Julia, targeted at users from some technical domain, such as science, economics or engineering. Users will learn how to interact with Julia's powerful command-line interface (REPL) as well as through Pluto notebooks. They will learn how to carry out basic mathematical and statistical operations; how to create custom workflows by learning about functions and basic iteration; and how to perform basic data manipulation and visualization. Setup instructions can be found here

NVivo Showcase

There's a lot more to NVivo than initially meets the eye! In this webinar we'll be showcasing our favourite features of NVivo including matrix coding queries, explore and comparison diagrams, and mind-maps. This session is perfect for researchers who are new to NVivo, as well as those who are familiar with the basics and curious to know what else is possible.

Research Computing with the Rust Programming Language

What is Rust, and how might you use it for research? Tim McNamara, author of Rust in Action, will give a quick primer on the Rust programming language, and explain how it might be used to speed up, and scale up, your research. No prior experience with the language is necessary.

Python for Image Manipulation and Repeatable Research Pipelines

You know how to crop an image, but what if you need to crop 65000 images in one go? This applied tutorial will introduce how the Python programming language can be used to create powerful, scalable and repeatable workflows, using image manipulation as an example. The session will include a live demo with commentary, project showcase and questions and answers. Having an entry level understanding of Python or a similar programming language will be helpful, but not essential.

Introduction to High Performance Computing with NeSI

A hands-on introduction to high performance computing (HPC) on a NeSI supercomputer. Members of the NeSI training team will guide attendees through HPC fundamentals including, software environment modules, scheduler use, profiling and scaling. We recommend you attend 'Introduction to the Command Line' or are already familiar with navigating a command line linux environment. Requirements: NeSI account, details provided after registration and closer to the event.

Keeping Your Spreadsheets Tidy

Good data organisation is the foundation of any research project. We often organise data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with it, but computers require data be organised in particular ways. In order to use tools that make computation more efficient such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers can make sense of it. Since this is where most research projects start, this is where we want to start too! Preparing data for analysis is an important part of the research workflow and some have estimated that this data preparation may take 4x as long as the 'analysis' itself. Some of this involves data cleaning, where errors in the data are identifed and corrected or formatting made consistent, but the foundation is to start with a machine readable datasheet. In this workshop we will cover the basics of good data hygiene and the core principles of the tidy data framework which ensures that your data are machine readable and ready for manipulation/analysis. We encourage you to bring along a device that has access to some kind of spreadsheet software (e.g. GoogleSheets, Excel, etc.), so you can spot the problems and work towards putting tidy data into practice.

Research Compute: An Overview of Options at the University of Auckland

Need more computer power to do your analysis? Is your laptop/desktop struggling to run your analysis? Come along to hear about virtual machines and High Performance Computing options available to University of Auckland staff and doctoral students.

Tidyverse and Beyond: Key Tips for Existing R Users

The tidyverse has changed R programming for data scientists tremendously: cleaning and analysing rectangular data, loops, and parallelization can now be performed through a number of convenient functions. This session offers some recipes and translations for existing R users who want to include more of the tidyverse in their everyday data analysis tasks.

Introduction to Qualtrics for Research Surveys

This session will introduce you to the Qualtrics survey tool, with a particular focus on how it can be used to help your research. Qualtrics is an easy to use, yet powerful tool that allows you to create and distribute fully customisable surveys for a broad range of purposes. The session will traduce you to setting up a survey, options for distribution, and options for analysing your data.

How to Plan Your Research for Real World Impact

Economic, societal and environmental impact, or the 'non-academic' impact of research, is becoming an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem. It is standard practice for researchers to be asked by funders to describe the benefits of their research and how they might enable that benefit to be achieved. This session offers a high-level step-by-step guide on how to incorporate impact into your research planning.

Digital Storytelling with KnightLab

Interested in learning how to use a suite of open-source tools to create interactive narratives and visualisations for your research? This session provides an overview of a range of free, easy-to-use tools from KnightLab useful for time or location-based narratives. Learn the basics and see how easy and fun it is to create a compelling StoryMap. Setup instructions can be found here

ResBaz Drop-In Clinic (HackyHour)

Open drop-in session to help with troubleshooting, getting help with installing session requirements, and any ResBaz questions. No registration required, just join via Zoom when the session starts.

Visual Abstracts Create an Attention Hook to Your Published Article

Visual abstracts are a 'movie poster' of a journal article displayed on social media that hooks a viewer's attention to read your article. Like a 3-minute thesis is a verbal elevator pitch, a visual abstract is a pictorial summary understood in a 30-second glance. Designed with icons and keywords, they are simpler than a graphical abstract and quicker to make. Visual abstracts are a powerful thinking tool for yourself and a valuable communication tool to engage others. The first half of the session is an interactive exploration of visual abstracts to inspire your imagination. The second half is a guided workshop where together we build your creative confidence by making a visual abstract. Please also see this collection of self-paced multimedia resources related to visual abstracts.

What is NeSI? New Zealand's National High Performance Computers

The computational requirements of high impact research seems to grow further beyond what individual groups and institutions can reasonably provide every year. New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) seeks to help meet these requirements for the New Zealand research community. In this talk we will go over the core services relating to high performance computing (HPC) that NeSI is able to provide, the reason why HPC might be suitable for your work, and how your research team can gain access to these resources.

Using the Command Line to Find, Replace, and Manipulate Data

A practical introduction to some powerful command line utilities for efficient searching, parsing and manipulating of files and text. We will cover some of the workhorse commands in the UNIX toolbox, such as find, grep, awk, and sed. These are simple to use for simple applications, but provide powerful ways to perform complex actions. With grep, we introduce regular expressions which are a widely-used language for specifying patterns in text. This workshop follows on from "Introduction to the command line" session, so it is assumed you will have either participated in this session or already have an understanding of the concepts covered in it. Setup instructions can be found here

Research Collaboration and Reproducibility with Google Colab

Finding it challenging to collaborate with other researchers? Do you want to make your research as accessible and reproducible as possible? Google Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that allows anybody to write and execute python code through the browser, while providing access free of charge to computing resources including GPUs. With a robust free tier, no installation or prerequisites, and a tonne of features, Google Colab can undoubtedly help you. This one-hour introductory workshop will demonstrate the most important features of Google Colab. Some UoA-specific topics will also be covered, such as how to mount your Google Drive or Dropbox so you can utilise your datasets and have your results saved automatically. This workshop's final section will showcase examples of how Google Colab is being used for research and education.

Doing Even More with OpenRefine

You know how to use Open Refine to clean up messy data using facets and clustering, and you're curious about some of its powerful features This demonstration of using transformations will include how to use snippets of reusable code to do things like select part of a sentence, swap author first and last names around, and use Python and Regex in OR. We will also look at using OR to query web based APIs to enrich a dataset.

Authoring Collaborative Research Projects in Quarto

Learn how to develop reproducible and sharable workflows using Quarto and Git. We will take you through how to host collaborative research projects as a formatted (and cool looking) HTML on GitHub. With some easy-to-learn version control and markdown syntax, research outputs can be shared as a live link that is consitent with your latest analyses. One benefit of Quarto is flexibility, accepting multiple programming languages (R, Python, Julia...) and output formats (docx, pdf, html...). It is recommended to attend the workshop here

Intro to Natural Language Processing using Python

What do Lorde, Seinfeld and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have in common? Properties of all three can be represented as text, whether that be song lyrics, episode scripts, or theme songs. Text allows for a unified representation of data, and researchers across different disciplines and methods all draw from text in different ways. Knowing even just a few basic computational linguistic methods can increase your efficiency as a researcher and open new avenues for research using your data. This short, introductory workshop will demonstrate how to perform basic operations on text, such as counting the frequency of different word types, computing measures of lexical diversity, and performing more complex operations such as sentiment analysis. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed.

Modern Data Stack in a Box with DuckDB and dbt

Are you interested in expanding your data engineering skills? Do you have your eyes set on future industry jobs? Whereas dbt is currently well in demand, Duckdb is a newer tool that will be rising in significance in the coming years. The idea of a modern data stack in a box is to make you productive using best data engineering practices minus the high cloud costs. DuckDB is an in-process SQL management system designed for analytics. It is combined with dbt which acts as the transformation layer for your data pipelines, letting you create robust systems for analytics and machine learning. Why use a single machine and not the cloud? As a starting point for data engineering pipelines, this allows you to have a self-contained system and create end-to-end pipelines that can be deployed with ease to other systems. You can also have the option to take your code and deploy it to other dbt adapters. This makes dbt a core part of the modern data stack. Come and learn more about both DuckDB and dbt in this workshop.

Using R for Statistical Analysis: A case study

This session will demonstrate the process of statistical analysis in R. We will work through an example from start to finish, including a discussion about how to select an appropriate statistical analysis, implement it in R, and present and interpret the results.

Hands-on Statistical Analysis with R

A hands-on workshop where we will explore some of the built-in demo data sets available in R. We will apply commonly used statistical analyses such as linear regression, independent-sample t-tests and chi-squared tests, discussing the output and how we might present the results for publication. Note: please install R and RStudio prior to the session.https://www.dataquest.io/blog/installing-r-on-your-computer

Introduction to the Python Programming Language

Embark on a practical and engaging journey into the world of Python with our hands-on, 2-hour workshop, designed to demystify one of the most popular and versatile programming languages extensively used in a multitude of research disciplines. Whether you're a complete beginner or merely aiming to refresh your understanding of Python basics, we will have an enriching session that navigates the language's fundamental elements. Our aim is to equip you with a comprehensive understanding of Python's essential syntax, control flow, and data structures, providing a solid foundation for you to explore and exploit the language's immense potential further. This workshop will give you the tools and confidence necessary to start applying Python to your respective research field.

Latex 101: An Introduction to Formatting Documents With Code

This session will introduce attendees to LaTeX, a popular typesetting system and programming language used to create professional-looking documents. We will cover the basics of LaTeX, explore how it differs from Microsoft Word, and equip learners with a solid foundation to build upon in later LaTeX sessions. Although there is an initial learning curve, time invested in learning LaTeX will pay off in the long term by giving you a reliable way to professionally format your documents.

Collaborating with Dropbox: Tips and Tricks

Led by the experts from Dropbox, this seminar is designed to help you make use of key features of this collaborative platform. Hosts will provide practical insights into how to effectively utilise Dropbox to improve collaboration, including how to manage files, share documents, and create teams, especially for those with institutional accounts (e.g. University of Auckland, University of Otago). Attendees will also learn about the latest features, including Transfer, Paper, Backup and how to use them to streamline workflows.

LaTeX, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Plain Text

This session expands upon "LaTeX 101" by introducing more features such as mathematical formulas, tables, figures, and bibliographies. These are the features which make LaTeX a popular, time-saving option for producing sophisticated scientific documents, and for having complete control over the formatting of each element. We will also touch on how to use LaTeX to create slides for presentations. This session is aimed at participants who want to improve their document formatting skills, particularly for academic and technical writing.

Introduction to Web Mapping with Leaflet

This workshop will introduce participants to the basics of creating a simple web-based map using the open-source JavaScript library, Leaflet. Participants will learn how to create an interactive map with custom markers, popups, and interactive layers. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the skills to create and publish their own simple web-based maps. Some experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript would be useful, but is not necessary.

Researcher Skills And Career Planning For Academia And Beyond

Learn about the different capabilities and skills needed for a successful career in academia, tips for planning your career in academia, and what transferable skills academics possess which are relevant outside of academia.

Introduction to Quarto

This workshop aims to introduce Quarto, a powerful tool for efficient document creation. Quarto leverages the simplicity of Markdown and the flexibility of modern web technologies to streamline the process of generating dynamic and interactive documents. In this tutorial, we will explore the key features of Quarto, including its seamless integration with R and Python, support for data visualisations, and collaborative authoring capabilities. By the end, you will have a solid understanding of Quarto's capabilities and be equipped to create stunning, data-driven documents effortlessly. Join us on this tutorial journey and unlock the potential of Quarto for your document workflow.

Chat GPT and AI Tools: Their impact on research

Are you a researcher looking for ways to improve your productivity and efficiency? If so, then you need to check out AI tools for research. AI tools can help you with everything from finding relevant information to writing code. In this presentation, we will explore the role of AI in research and highlight various tools available to researchers, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool with applications in many fields of science. GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that offers autocomplete-style suggestions as you code. We will talk about how these tools were developed and how they work. There will also be a demonstration of some real-world applications of these tools. Finally, there will be time to discuss ethical considerations, questions, and answers. This presentation is for researchers of all levels, from beginners to experts. Whether you are just starting your research career or a seasoned veteran, you will learn something new from this presentation. So what are you waiting for? Register for this presentation today and learn how AI can help you take your research to the next level.

Cybersecurity for Researchers - Would Your Research Survive a Cyberattack?

Researchers are increasingly utilising digital tools and technologies to make research bigger, faster, more efficient or tackle problems in new ways. However, digital tools come with risks - web applications for collecting data, virtual machines for running analysis, and sharing research data online can lead to your data being lost or held to ransom. How would your research project cope with a significant delay as data and systems were recovered? Join this session to hear about the risks and our advice to avoid or address frequently seen vulnerabilities.

7 Strategies to Help Keep Your Research Safe

UoA Security Office provides 7 strategies with actionable steps to help keep your research safe and secure. Attendess will learn how to include security through the entire data lifecycle in partnership with university services. We will provide some practical demos and answers to your questions on how to enable security within research.

When Science Meets the Headlines: Media Engagement for Research Impact

Have you got a big paper coming out that you think is newsworthy? The Science Media Centre can help you get journalists' attention. This session will introduce you to Scimex - our online portal for promoting embargoed research to registered journalists - alongside our other tools and resources for media engagement. You will learn some tips and tricks on what to do when a journalist calls, and how to ensure your expertise has impact.