Newsletters
DAFNI Newsletter, March 2026
Updated on May 14 2026
Introduction
Further to our announcement that Professor Jim Hall will be one of our keynote speakers, I am delighted to announce that Femke Vossepoel, Professor of Earth System Simulation at Delft University of Technology and UrbanAIR Project Lead, will be one of our Invited Speakers.
The goal of UrbanAIR is to develop a new digital twin that supports decision-makers in urban areas to deal with design dilemmas in atmospheric heat and air quality to maximise the health and socio-economic well-being of its citizens affected by climate change.
DAFNI’s role is to plan the framework for the ‘digital twins’ of the participating cities. This will enable the creation of both climate and human behaviour simulation models that will feed into the EU’s ambitious Destination Earth platform.
Our Conference theme this year is ‘Climate and Security Resilience’ with a dual focus on Government Industrial Strategy, and on Clean Energy. Book now for 10th September 2026 – we look forward to welcoming you to Rhodes House in Oxford.
We were hugely impressed by the variety and quality of the applications we received for our DAFNI Fellowship Programme and we look forward to announcing who has been successful very soon. Each Fellow will become an ambassador for DAFNI, being involved in sustainable research, the promotion of their research within the DAFNI Centre of Excellence for Resilient Infrastructure Analysis,the building of our networks across government, industry and academia, and inputting into DAFNI’s Roadmap.
Sign up for our first webinar of 2026, which will be led by Professor Richard Kingston, Professor of Urban Planning and GIS at the University of Manchester. He will share how the NERC Digital Solutions Hub (DSH) is developing new approaches to connect, discover, and analyse environmental data across the UK research landscape, such as AI-assisted data discovery and services built around Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), and how these can help link environmental, infrastructure, and socio-economic datasets.
Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead
News from our central team
The lack of consideration for human behaviour is a critical gap in current energy demand forecasting models. The ForNET team (FORecasting Services for Energy NETworks) captures new and emerging patterns of usage, to better forecast and accurately manage a household’s needs.
ForNET offers an innovative approach that combines behavioural and statistical elements for forecasting energy consumption has led to greater predictive accuracy and improved modelling. From a practitioner’s perspective, the impact lies in creating a platform that enables companies or local authorities to assess how new legislation or initiatives could affect energy consumption in a particular area. Energy providers can also experiment with how changes to their tariffs affect energy consumption and use the data to inform future decision-making.
Click to download or read the full case study
The ForNET team:
Professor Konstantinos (Kostas) Nikolopoulos, Director of the IHRR Forecasting Laboratory and Co-Director of the Centre from the Summit of Institute Hazard Risk and Resilience at Durham University; Dr Yang Lu, Associate Professor at York St John University during this research, now Senior Lecturer at Loughborough University; Dr Haoran Zhang, Researcher at University College London and later at Imperial College London; Dr Vasileios Bougioukos (Research Associate at IHRR Forecasting Laboratory at Durham University and Adjunct Associate Professor at Notre Dame London during this research) now Associate Professor in Economics at Richmond American University London; and two external collaborators: Dr Evangelos Theodorou and Mr Konstantinos Soiledis, IHRR Forecasting Laboratory, Durham University.
Join us at the 2026 DAFNI Conference
10th September 2026 at Rhodes House in Oxford
We would be delighted to welcome you. This year we are focusing on Climate and Security Resilience and focusing on the Government’s Industrial Strategy, specifically Clean Energy.
Hot topics to be discussed will include:
- Data in AI
- Infrastructure resilience
- Federated research
Tickets are £50 per person (£25 students)
Pre-registrations are open now.
Join us on Wednesday 22 April 2026 where Professor Richard Kingston will introduce the NERC Digital Solutions Hub (DSH) platform and demonstrate how emerging tools, such as AI-assisted data discovery and services built around Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), can help link environmental, infrastructure, and socio-economic datasets.
The session will explore how the Hub enables researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to find and use environmental data more effectively and how DSH has collaborated with DAFNI to explore ways of connecting the DSH to JASMIN and other remote compute resources with opportunities for collaboration and user testing as DSH continues to evolve its next-generation digital infrastructure.
➡️ ➡️ Secure your free webinar place now: https://cvent.me/XYP8ga
User liaison news
Members of the DAFNI team attended the 2026 Energy Network Hubs Risk and Resilience Day, which this year was held at the University of Edinburgh’s Climate Change Institute. Kyle Stevenson and Elizabeth Mamtsits were able to catch up with researchers who worked on the BSRW programme with DAFNI, as well as the wider energy infrastructure community, to find out how projects focused on building a resilient grid in Scotland and the wider UK were progressing.
The DAFNI team also presented a poster at the event to demonstrate how DAFNI can help infrastructure researchers, as well as users interested in science driven policy.
Partnership news
Bridging the gap: CROSSEU DSS accepted for EGU26 presentation
DAFNI’s collaboration within the CROSSEU project has reached a new milestone. The DAFNI team’s abstract, “Bridging Physical Risk and Human Impacts: The CROSSEU Decision Support System for Climate Resilience in Europe”, has been accepted for the EGU26 conference under the session on Socio-Economic Vulnerability and Climate Resilience. The conference takes place in May in Austria and online.
What is the CROSSEU DSS?
Developed as part of CROSSEU’s Work Package 3, the Decision Support System (DSS) is designed to translate complex climate risk information into actionable insights for European policymakers.
The DAFNI DSS edge:
- Infrastructure: The DSS is hosted on the DAFNI platform, providing the robust computational power needed to handle multi-sectoral data.
- Visualisation: It integrates the WEMC Teal tool, enabling interactive exploration of geophysical and demographic data.
- Real-World application: A beta version is already operational, featuring a case study on heat-related mortality in the Czech Republic, illustrating how rising temperatures specifically impact vulnerable urban populations.
Why it matters:
Climate adaptation is about more than just predicting the weather; it’s about protecting people. Through stakeholder co-production and interdisciplinary data, we are helping move Europe toward more equitable and evidence-based climate policy.
NERC Digital Solutions Hub project to connect CEDA’s environmental data via DAFNI
DAFNI is working on a project funded by NERC and delivered as part of the NERC Digital Solutions Hub, a free-to-use, online, open-access platform that makes it easy to find, view, and use environmental, social, health, and economic data.
The Digital Solutions Hub (DSH) provides access to information from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) data centres as well as data from trusted organisations such as DEFRA, the Environment Agency, Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, SEPA, the Office for National Statistics, and the Met Office. The data can be used by policymakers to make data-driven and informed long-term planning decisions, as well as providing real-time data useful for short-term planning.
DAFNI’s role on the project aims to improve access to high‑value environmental data by enabling selected datasets from the CEDA Archive to be surfaced through the DAFNI platform.
CEDA operates one of the UK’s primary environmental data archives, holding extensive climate‑related datasets including Earth observation data, airborne and satellite imagery, environmental observations, and numerical weather prediction outputs.
This work aims to help researchers make better use of interconnected datasets for modelling, decision‑making and cross‑disciplinary research. By enabling access to trusted CEDA‑hosted datasets within DAFNI’s secure research environment, the project will open these resources to a broader community of modelling scientists working in climate, environmental change, and infrastructure resilience.
Once complete, the integration will provide researchers with seamless access to curated environmental data directly within their computational workflows, helping to accelerate analysis, support reproducible research, and enhance the UK’s digital research capability.
Attend our 22 April webinar to find out more.
DAFNI presents at the Connected Places Summit
This month (March) the Connected Places Catapult (CPC) hosted their main conference of the year: Connected Places Summit 2026 – Wrapped. Catapult centres are designed to fill the gap between academia and industry supporting innovative businesses to grow and boosting innovation across the wider UK economy.
The CPC conference presented a great opportunity to hear about innovation and current central and regional government policy. The event was split across three tracks: Data Infrastructure, Construction and Local Growth and Transport. A key theme of the tracks was how innovators can support the delivery of government policy ambitions across some significant large-scale projects, from HS2 to the development of future housing infrastructure
An interesting session related to DAFNI was held in the data stream and focused on growing the business of tomorrow with data. In this session Justin Anderson presented work done at CPC including innovation within the CReDO project and how this has developed the Catapults’ capability in the domain of data assurance within the context of infrastructure modelling. The DAFNI services provide the underlying platform that supports the CReDo project.
Justin presented a vision for assured digital models. These have been tested on platforms such as CReDO to prove their suitability for applications from climate adaptation within networks of utility providers, to the management of crowds in train stations. The concept described was that models assured at the Catapult would be given a passport of assurance to support their deployment within other cities or infrastructure.
Aside from the assurance angle, the portability of models and the use between domains is supported further by the growing AI sector and technologies, in particular specific to transferred learning. For DAFNI this is of interest, and something we are exploring within our strategy, aiming to join DAFNI members who publish models on the platform with potential end users in government and industry.
DAFNI platform features and updates
This month the DAFNI platform development team continued work across their two main focus areas: upgrading the DAFNI front-end to deliver a better platform experience, with a current focus on improving workflow building; and building a new service for creating public project collections, with the aim of making project outputs more findable on the platform. The team also welcomed an apprentice onto the team who will be with us for the next six months to learn about DAFNI’s technologies and gain experience in our ways of working.
Access our help
If you are a user of the platform and have any feedback or platform requests, please contact support@dafni.ac.uk
DAFNI researchers’ news
Congratulations to DAFNI researchers for new paper publications:
New paper from the D-RES team (Provision of distributed grid resilience using EV’s during extreme weather events). ‘Weather-informed optimal scheduling of electric vehicle charging under extreme conditions: A case study from the Scottish islands,’ published in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems. Congratulations to the D- RES team. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142061525008774
👨🔬 Authors: Weizhe Q., Peter McCallum, Laiz Souto, Desen Kırlı.
Paper published by the NIRD project team (National Infrastructure Resilience Demonstrator) have published a new paper focusing on building systemic resilience of interdependent infrastructure networks at the national scale and have published a new paper in the Elsevier Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment journal, ‘Stress-testing road network resilience using counterfactual flood events (1953–2024) in Great Britain’.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920926000854
👨🔬 Authors: Yue LI, Raghav Pant, Tom Russell, Fred Thomas, Jim Hall, Philip Oldham, Rob Lamb, Paul Young
Community news
In-person hackathon: Data driven approaches to safeguarding cultural heritage
🗓️ 17 Apr 2026, 10:00 – 16:00 📌 University of Brighton 🎟️ Free
The DISKAH network, the Archaeology Data Service, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)‑funded Data/Culture Project from Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, and DAFNI are hosting a one-day hackathon on 17 April 2026.
The event is open to researchers, digital research technical professionals, creative technologists, computational artists and practitioners working with Arts and Humanities data. You do not need to be highly proficient in coding to join the event, but you should have some experience with digital methods, software development, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for coding. Attendees will need to bring their own laptops for the hackathon.
Watch our past webinars
View recordings of past webinars at https://www.dafni.ac.uk/news-events/events/webinars/
DAFNI YouTube channel: catch up on conferences and interviews
Visit https://www.youtube.com/@dafnifacility118
DAFNI Technical Training
A great opportunity to get up to speed quickly on DAFNI and to ask our technical experts your burning questions. Especially recommended for those developing a research proposal and are thinking of including DAFNI as the platform of choice for the research.
To attend the event you will need experience of entering code through a command line interface, for more information and to register your interest, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/dafni3179319835
Access our help
Please contact us directly for any assistance on info@dafni.ac.uk