Welcome to the DAFNI May newsletter. 

The DAFNI Conference 2024 plans are ramping up, we are pleased to announce that this year we will be hosting an exhibition space, if this is something of interest to you, please get in contact with info@dafni.ac.uk. Our conference agenda is shaping up nicely and will be released shortly, please sign up here for early bird access! Our keynotes have now been confirmed, we look forward to announcing in July.

Last week, we held our first DAFNI Networkshop event on 21st May, which was about bringing together our users, networking and looking at DAFNI’s future roadmap developments. We would like to say thank you to all our amazing platform users for providing updates on their research and their work on the DAFNI platform. Another thank you to the DAFNI technical team who gave great presentations and live demonstrations on the day. Following the success of this event we now plan to make it an annual event!

This month we also held our DAFNI Technical User Group meeting, the purpose of this session is to invite platform users to review upcoming releases to the platform and future roadmap developments. This session was very beneficial to the technical team as the users provided a great steer on both aspects! We would like to say thank you to the group and we look forward to the next meeting in the autumn time.  

The DAFNI programme has had great successes in May, we are looking forward to a busy month of June, including our June webinar which will be presented by Francesca Pianosi and Saskia Salwey, please register here to learn more about this event on uncertainty quantification. 

Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead

DAFNI is running a monthly lunchtime webinar series throughout 2024. Each month a different speaker is discussing their work using the DAFNI platform. The sessions run for 60 minutes: 40 minutes for the presentations and 20 minutes for questions.

Our new Centre of Excellence researchers presented last week on their Transport projects. We would like to say thank you to Dr Qiuchen Lu, Dr Ji-Eun Byun and Dr Fabian Steinmann for their insightful presentations. The DAFNI programme is looking forward to the research outputs! We recorded the session, if you would like to watch it back, please click here.

Next month’s webinar will focus on research from the University of Bristol on Uncertainty Quantification, please see below for more information on June’s webinar and other upcoming events.

Dr Francesca Pianosi is Senior Lecturer in Water and Environmental Engineering based in the School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on advancing the way mathematical modelling is used to inform decision-making under uncertainty, particularly for water resource and natural risk management. She is an international expert on uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis and the lead author of the open-source SAFE toolbox, which is used by thousands of scientists and practitioners worldwide to analyse the propagation of uncertainty in mathematical models (https://safetoolbox.github.io/). 

Wednesday 12th June at 12pm.

Register Here

Join us for an update on our 3 Sandpit Energy Projects

Hannah Bloomfield, BRINES

BRINES (Building Risk-Informed redundancy for Net-Zero Energy Systems) is a project led by Dr Hannah Bloomfield from the University of Cranfield along with Professor Sean Wilkinson, Newcastle University and Dr Ji-Eun Byun, University of Glasgow. The project proposes addressing higher variability and higher correlations in weather events, power generation, and demand.

Desen Kirli, D-RES

D-RES (Provision of distributed grid resilience using EVs during extreme weather events) is a collaboration project led by Dr Desen Kirli from University of Edinburgh along with Dr Laiz Souto from University of Bristol.

Project D-RES has a focus on digital twin modelling, which aims to ensure optimal use of existing assets, leveraging their flexibility to ensure energy security and interoperability as the volume of renewables increases and the frequency of extreme weather increases due to climate change.

Kostas Nikolopoulos, ForNet

ForNet (FORecasting Services for Energy NETworks) is a collaboration project led by Professor Konstantinos (Kostas) Nikolopoulos from Durham University. The team is made up of Dr Yang Lu, York St John University and Dr Haoran Zhang, Imperial College London. This project is looking at providing Forecasting services for the DAFNI platform combining quantitative time series methods (Professor Nikolopoulos), judgmental/behavioural methods/adjustments (Dr. Lu) and treatment for extreme events (Dr. Zhang).

Wednesday 10th July at 12pm.

Register Here

Coming to Northern Ireland as well as Wales and Scotland! 

Our roadshow tour will be extended to Northern Ireland, marking our first roadshow event in the region! We are making great progress with the Scotland and Wales roadshows too. Please get in touch if you are based in these locations or have relevant network contacts for us to connect with. We are planning to host the events within an academic partner’s institution, please contact info@dafni.ac.uk if this would be of interest to your University. 

The roadshows will take place in the Autumn and involve a DAFNI introduction and platform demonstration, followed by lightning talks from the host area on their current research, which allows all parties to explore opportunities of how we can collaborate. 

Please note, the DAFNI programme team are in the planning stages for additional roadshow events around the UK, if this is something of interest to you, please contact info@dafni.ac.uk  

Book now for our 2024 DAFNI conference on the 10th of September 2024! 

We are holding early bird prices up until July 2024! From August standard prices will rise from £45 to £60, student prices will rise from £20 to £30 

We would like to thank everyone who came to the inaugural DAFNI Networkshop on 21st May 2024 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The day-long event was a fantastic opportunity to meet other DAFNI users, make new connections, hear from the DAFNI team about new platform developments, and to hear more about projects taking place using the DAFNI platform and within the DAFNI programme.

Lively discussions and presentations covered use of the DAFNI platform for modelling, visualisation and data storage in areas from energy to roads, rail, airports, and buried infrastructure

We plan to run the Networkshop event on an annual basis and would also like to highlight the DAFNI Conference as an excellent opportunity to share ideas with other researchers in infrastructure and to hear more about uses of DAFNI on 10 September 2024 in Birmingham.

New

• BETA: Added the option to send users email notifications when Workflows finish and when Models finish ingesting. This is a beta feature. For more information on using beta features please see the documentation

Improvements

• Updated our User Documentation on Model Metadata and added a Getting Started on DAFNI section

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where deleted Dataset Versions where showing in the version list
• Fixed an issue where deleting the non-latest version of a Dataset would show an error
• Fixed an issue where deleting the latest Model/Workflow Version and then attempting to upload a new Version was showing an error
• Fixed an issue where viewing a Workflow details page could error if there were no Instances

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 queries that you may be having on the DAFNI platform. 

No technical question is too big or small. The next two dates for these drop-ins are: 2 – 4pm 19th June 2024 and 2 – 4pm 17th July 2024. The link for the Zoom call is here.

A great opportunity to get up to speed quickly on DAFNI and to ask our technical experts your burning questions. Highly recommended for those developing a research proposal and are thinking of including DAFNI as the platform of choice for the research.  

Our regular technical training events (Wednesdays, 1:30pm) on DAFNI are available to book via Eventbrite. Next 2024 training events:

• 10 July 
• 4 September
• 30 October

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

Apply for a DAFNI account

To request your account, please go to the DAFNI website and complete the short questionnaire:
https://www.dafni.ac.uk/dafnilogin/

Current users of DAFNI

Get updated on the latest technical updates and features, visit: https://www.dafni.ac.uk/dafnilogin/

About DAFNI

The DAFNI platform supports research that aims to provide the UK with a world-leading infrastructure system that is more integrated, efficient, powerful, reliable, resilient and affordable. It is enabling the community to conduct research that is able to generate new insights at a higher level of detail and accuracy than ever before.
 
To find out more about DAFNI, visit: www.dafni.ac.uk​