DAFNI Newsletter, February 2025

Welcome to the DAFNI February 2025 newsletter!

Further to our announcement in last month’s newsletter that our conference venue will be The Edge at the University of Sheffield, I am pleased to include details of our exciting line up of speakers for this year’s conference. We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Juliet Mian, Director of Arup’s Climate Services and Sustainability portfolio, and Dr Sarah Hayes, Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) Strategic Advisor, from Connected Places Catapult as our keynote speakers.

Our theme this year is ‘Bridging the Gap between Academia, Government and Industry’, including the sub-themes of Climate Resilience, and Security and Trusted Research. We are holding a panel on Trusted Research, which will include
Emily Jefferson, Chief Technology Officer at Health Data Research UK, with Jason Feehily, Head of Trusted Research at University of Nottingham, and David Batho, Senior Security Specialist at Jisc. Book your place now.

After the success of our 2024 webinar series, we are now planning this year’s programme. Our next webinar will be led by Dr Xilin Xia of University of Birmingham, on the STORMS project focusing on the resilience of buried infrastructure to
meteorological shocks, on Wednesday 30th April at 12pm. Our data sharing project with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is now in its final few months and in March we are hosting a showcase event for
‘Data Infrastructure for National Infrastructure’ (DINI) at the Satellite Applications Catapult on Harwell Campus. The event will showcase the project work, with speakers including DSIT project partners, DSIT pilot projects and invited guests. We have opened this opportunity up to all interested parties – please sign up to the event here. NB – there are limited spaces available!

We are working on the final designs of our new website to ensure accessibility and to showcase the DAFNI community’s research in a more effective and more user-friendly way. We are really looking forward to showing you the results over the coming months!

Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead

Bookings now open for 2025 DAFNI Annual Conference

Venue: The Edge at the University of Sheffield

Our theme this year is ‘Bridging the Gap between Academia, Government and Industry’ and we already have an exciting line-up of speakers, including our two keynote speakers, Dr Juliet Mian, Director of Arup’s Climate Services and Sustainability portfolio, and Dr Sarah Hayes, Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) Strategic Advisor, from Connected Places Catapult.
Prices: £50, student £25.
Book via: https://web.cvent.com/event/f255b158-1692-49f3-9efd-a68e3c86eba1/summary

DAFNI-DINI Showcase

09:30 Arrival – Networking Breakfast
10:00 Welcome and housekeeping – Dr Brian Matthews, STFC
10:05 Department of Science Innovation and Technology Overview – Oliver Tones, Department of Science Innovation and Technology
10:20 Workshops Lightning Talks – UK Energy Data Centre by Catherine Jones; Icebreaker One by Gea Mikic and Ceri Stanaway; Digital Curation Centre by Clara Lines Diaz, UK Collaboratorium for Research on
Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC by Dr Joanne Leach
11:05 Break
11:30 Use cases
11:50 Champions
Water System Leakage, Professor Liz Varga
Enabling Urban Mobility Data Sharing (e-UMDS), Professor Theo Tryfonas
Quasi-Real-Time Data with Quasi-Imaginary-Access, Dr Giuliano Punzo
12:20 Recommendations – Dr Brian Matthews, STFC
12:55 Lunch and Poster Session
14:25 Panel Session – Professor Liz Varga, UCL; Mark Enzer, Mott MacDonald; Miranda Sharpe, Icebreaker One.
15:30 Closing Remarks

This exciting event is open to any interested parties. Join us to hear about the DAFNI-DINI project work, including the project use cases, workshops, champions and discussions of the project results and recommendations.

Book your place via:
https://web.cvent.com/event/016c6434-99d2-47f2-b0e6-81c24cf9723c/summary

30th April – STORMS webinar

Dr Xilin Xia, Assistant Professor in Resilience Engineering, University of Birmingham, will present on the STORMS project – Strategies and Tools for Resilience of Buried Infrastructure to Meteorological Shocks.

STORMS has developed a weather-related risk assessment framework to increase resilience to weather-related risks, including analysing soil structure data and damage calculations for buried pipes. DAFNI is
being used for the workflows and visualisations. The STORMS project also models what may happen in the future and can be used to help map required adaptations for climate change and to increase
resilience at network and national scale to inform national guidance.

Co-Investigator: Professor Nicole Metje, University of Birmingham
Co-I: Professor David Hannah, University of Birmingham
Co-I: Dr Asaad Faramarzi, University of Birmingham
Co-I: Dr Soroosh Sharifi, University of Birmingham
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Nikolas Reppas, University of Birmingham
Co-I, Dr Steven Cole, UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology
Co-I, Mr Robert Moore, UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology
Co-I, Dr Adam Griffin, UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology
Co-I, Dr Alison Kay, UK Centre of Ecology and Hydrology
Co-I, Dr Andrew Hughes, British Geological Survey

News from our central team

Insights from the UK government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Chris Johnson

We interviewed CSA Chris Johnson about the importance of data management and accessibility of data for UK growth, as well as how he sees the role of DAFNI and how DAFNI can support the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s agenda.

He said, “Research platforms like DAFNI enable us to think through and work through what the implications of policy are, so that we can measure the services that we provide to the public in terms of things that have value, like whether you can go back to work or whether you can continue to study.”

Click to read the full interview

Solar Digital Twin demo at DAFNI

Work has been ongoing on a demonstration digital twin which integrates weather data into the Sandia Labs (US DoE) Solar Energy Model. It is hoped that in the future this demo can be used as an example for users who are interested in developing a digital twin themselves.

A trial version of the digital twin is currently running as a DAFNI cron workflow, which is providing up-to date estimates of future solar energy production at major Solar Panel sites in the UK.

At present – as an example case – the model prediction can be compared to sensor data from the Newcastle Urban Observatory. Persistent data – gathered from the solar model, weather forecasts [1,2], and real data from the Newcastle Urban Observatory – is saved to a postgreSQL database at STFC and results can be accessed via a dashboard.

Though at present the data is limited to the largest solar power sites, the digital twin is designed to scale in a flexible manner and could potentially be extended to cover more sites in the UK. It is hoped that this demonstration digital twin will be made fully available to users, later this year.
[1] https://open-meteo.com/
[2] https://www.ecmwf.int/

Traffic predictions under climate change

Learn more about the DAFNI-funded work on a dynamic Digital Twin platform for traffic predictions under climate change from Dr. Qiuchen Lu, Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, UCL.

03 March 2025, 10:00 am–11:00 am, online

Book for the workshop

IMPACT is a collaboration project led by Qiuchen Lu and Tao Cheng from University College London. The team is made up of Tohid Erfani, University College London, Trung Hieu Tran, Cranfield University, Mr Xuhui Lin, University
College London and Mr Xianghui Zhang, University College London. This project is looking into IMproving flood disruPted road networks with a dynAmic people-Centric digital Twins (IMPACT)

Modelling Aviation Resilience Scenarios (MARS) – watch the video presentation

Disruption to UK airports and airlines from drones, cyber attacks or a technical glitch – just some of the reasons why the “Modelling Aviation Resilience Scenarios (MARS)” project is critical. Dr. Fabian Steinmann, Lecturer in
Organizational Resilience and Change at Cranfield School of Management, presented the DAFNI-funded MARS aviation resilience project in a spotlight session at the 2024 DAFNI Conference.

The project is developing a computational model of the UK airport network, enabling the research team to simulate airport closures and the subsequent diversion of aircraft to alternate airports. Critically, it is investigating the diversion process, highlighting potential bottlenecks in the system and providing crucial information for the ODLG for the next iteration of the protocol. Project outputs will identify airports, where additional pre-approved slots would stabilise the system during mass diversion events.

Co-investigator on the project is Dr Irene Moulitsas, Director of Computational and Software Techniques in Engineering with Researcher Dr Desmond Bala Bisandu, Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow, also from Cranfield University.

Click to watch the video.

Partnerships update

CROSSEU is a pan European project focused on bringing climate researchers together with socio economic specialists to identify and help mitigate the risks of climate change. DAFNI’s role in the project is to provide the computing platform at the centre of the projects, linking data and climate models along with the researchers and teams that use them.

The CROSSEU General Assembly from 27 to 29 January in Prague was the project’s second in person General Assembly, and an opportunity to look in detail at work done and work planned for the next 12 months.

The DAFNI team were represented by Tom Kirkham, Server Kasap and Teagan Zoldoske who reported on the STFC DAFNI activity in relation to progress around the integration and use of DAFNI within the project.

The Prague meeting was the first time the three DAFNI team members had met project collaborators in person, and the hosts at the Czech University of Prague were very welcoming, and despite the weather ensured the event was a great success and opportunity to sample traditional Czech food.

DAFNI platform features and updates

On 18th February we had a release that included:

New

Added support for numeric enumerated model parameters in the workflow builder

Improvements

Empty fields are no longer included in downloaded model definition files

Fixes

Fixed an issue causing an error to display when requesting to add assets to the public group

On 27th February we released:

New
Added a series of basic walkthroughs of core platform functionality, with examples, to the user
documentation
Added a section on sharing assets to the user documentation
Added a template model definition file to the user documentation

Improvements
Updated the user documentation to recommend using Rancher Desktop for running Docker commands when preparing models
Updated the base Docker image used by Jupyter Notebook visualisations to the latest Jupyter Data Science Notebook

Fixes
Fixed an issue causing workflow instances run by other users to be visible
Fixed an issue causing deleted assets to appear on groups pages

Join our monthly Zoom drop-ins for users

We run monthly drop-in sessions in which we will be available on an open Zoom call for 2 hours to give you 1-to-1 support with any help that you may need on the DAFNI platform. No technical question is too big or small.

The next dates are Wednesdays: 26th March, 23rd April at 2pm-4pm.

Join at: https://ukri.zoom.us/j/91689519352 or contact us on info@dafni.ac.uk

DAFNI technical training

Our regular technical training events (Wednesdays, 1:30pm-4:30pm) on DAFNI are available to book via Eventbrite. Next training dates:
12th March 2025
7th May 2025
2nd July 2025
27th August 2025

To attend the event you will need experience of entering code through a command line interface, for more information and to book, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/dafni-31793198351