// Latest Posts

Accelerating the University’s research ambitions with a more powerful HPC service

The University’s High Performance Computing (HPC) service is a research facility available to academic staff and research students, from any School or Faculty, who have the need for computing resource substantially greater than a standard PC. Enabling research that changes the world As one of the UK’s leading research universities, UoN is renowned for the …

Text Translation using Azure Cognitive Services Translator

In this blog, we describe how to translate text using some simple Python code and the Azure translator service. Azure Text Translator Azure Cognitive Services Translator is a cloud-based service that enables quick and accurate translation across many languages. The translator service can be used for: Language detection One-to-one or one-to-many translation Script transliteration (text …

Using Julia on the HPC

In this blog, we explore the speed and efficiency of using the programming language Julia on the University’s high-performance computer. This blog has been guest-authored by Jamie Mair, a PhD researcher in the School of Physics and Astronomy. The repository for the code given below, which was presented at this year’s annual UoN HPC conference, …

Introducing Trusted Research Environments

The UoN Trusted Research Environment (TRE) Service is now live. The University of Nottingham’s pioneering Trusted Research Environment (TRE) platform is now live, enhancing the University’s research capabilities. Hosted by Digital and Technology Services (DTS) in Microsoft Azure, the secure data platform is available to researchers, partnered institutions and trusted organisations working with highly sensitive …

HoloLens 2 and research

This week, we trialled HoloLens 2 technology with colleagues from the School of Life Sciences, the Biodiscovery Institute, the School of Education, the Nanoscale & Microscale Research Centre, and the Hounsfield Facility.  The workshop was led by InterReality Labs, with support from Microsoft. The HoloLens 2 is an untethered, wearable device that can project holographic …

Approaches to tracking impact

In this blog, we consider approaches to tracking research impact, with a focus on digital tools. We will outline reasons for gathering evidence of impact, what tools you might need to do this, and how digital approaches can help. In short: how can you gather material to show the positive societal change that your work …

Archiving a website

In this guide, we show you how to download and package a website for archiving. If you have produced a website for your research project, you may wish to archive it (or be obliged by your funder to do so). Here, we show you how to do two things: (a) convert a website to a …

Automated anonymisation of texts and transcripts

In this blog, we discuss an automated process for anonymising interview transcripts, patient notes, or other free-text data containing personal information.  Colleagues wishing to share participant notes or interview transcripts, for example as publication appendices or in a research data repository, will likely need to anonymise the data. Anonymisation also comes with a number of …

Creating UoN Research Link

In this blog, we talk about how we created UoN Research Link and some of the technical and design decisions taken. What is UoN Research Link? UoN Research Link is a pilot tool with support until November 2025. It lets you search for University of Nottingham colleagues according to research interests and expertise. It can …

Train a Custom Computer Vision Model using Detectron2

Training a custom computer vision model to work on your research dataset may be daunting due to the imagined complexities and effort involved. However, some very powerful open-source frameworks, such as Detectron2, have recently been made available to simplify the process. Detectron2 is an open-source framework that implements state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms. Detectron2 comes with …