A toast to our inaugural Scotland Roadshow!
Thank you to everyone who joined us at the inaugural DAFNI Scotland roadshow recently where we discussed research into infrastructure systems and the challenges and opportunities of data sharing!
Our thanks to the Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow and 📸 Lynne McCorriston, Research and Business Development Manager at University of Glasgow for hosting us from 22-23 October 2024!
We would like to thank all our fantastic speakers as well as all the delegates who came from across industry, academia and other organisations across Scotland to make this such a worthwhile event!
Our keynote talks
📸 Professor Mathew Williams delivered our Day 1 morning keynote. He is the Chief Scientific Adviser, Environmental, Natural Resources and Agriculture, at the Scottish Government and a Professor at University of Edinburgh where he is Chair of Global Change Ecology. He emphasised that planning needs more strategic thinking to overcome being locked into cycles that don’t understand the realities of the close interactions between economy and nature.
Government and scientists need to work in a joined up, systemic way and government need researchers to help provide answers to questions as his department seeks to strengthen links between science and policy, to support adaptive, agile policy where science & evidence help identify cost effective options, assess whether policy is delivering, and assess practice and set new goals and repeat the cycle.
Mathew sees a clear role for DAFNI in areas such as bringing together key datasets and metadata needed for decision making, helping to engage with decision makers and to empower decision makers to use tools and be confident using them, so that ultimately research can connect more broadly to government for natural resource decision making – for example to prepare for drought and flood planning with infrastructure adaptations.
📸 Olly Tones, Head of Data Sharing and Technology, gave the keynote on Day 2, presenting a programme overview for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. He highlighted that today we have plenty of data, in fact we are drowning in a sea of data in a way that we weren’t 10 years ago. We also have privacy enhancing technologies and better encryption… but we need more people with training in technical skills and knowledge who can manage the data.
We need to create a data first culture, and to ensure leadership sees data as essential to work. There is also curation and management required to meet challenges such as data quality, its provenance, and to identify what makes the data valuable and makes it useable. We need to go far beyond creating a lake, a pond, or a pool of data!
He noted that government is at the discovery phase of thinking about a National Research Data Cloud – a concept rather like a National Data Library – and that the results of the DAFNI DINI project (Data Infrastructure for National Infrastructure) work will go into shaping what the National Data Library could look like, moving it from being a concept to a reality over the next 5-10 years.
As regards the DAFNI DINI project, 📸 Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Leader, explained that DAFNI has been tasked by DSIT to focus on exploring the barriers and opportunities for data sharing in national infrastructure systems: Water, Energy, Transport, as part of a wider DSIT pilot initiative to understand the need for a UK Research Data Cloud. The Research Data Cloud will be a shared virtual space or platform that provides a marketplace for data and services, and a global trusted ecosystem that provides seamless access to high quality, interoperable research outputs and services and enables data reuse and Open Science more generally.
Brian also introduced DAFNI’s remit and history, upcoming roadmap and gave examples of DAFNI users, followed by a technical demonstration of DAFNI from Dr Jens Jensen, DAFNI Team Lead, before we moved onto the lightning talks from universities across Scotland.
Lightning Talks
13 lightning talks from Scottish Universities highlighted a fascinating range of research themes and how DAFNI might be used to further their research.
First up, Professor Berk Canberk, Edinburgh Napier, spoke on ‘Digital Twins for Transport Systems’, he highlighted the importance of digital twin-aided green mobility management in the next generation of transportation systems and using DTs to combine historical and real-time data.
📸 Dr Ji-Eun Byun, University of Glasgow, introduced the ‘ClimaTracks’ DAFNI-funded project she is working on: a transport project researching forecasting resilience of railway networks under propagating uncertainty. The work combines weather data, asset conditioning and topography to address high uncertainty, and propagate uncertainty to compute the risk and address lack of ready-to-use computational tools. They are developing an interactive risk map prototype.
Dr Desen Kirli, University of Edinburgh, introduced her DAFNI-funded work on ‘Resilience using EVs during extreme weather’. “D-RES” is aiming to address the challenge of more frequent and intense weather events which pose a significant threat to the power grid resilience and may prohibit the rise of EV usage. Their work includes a case study of the Orkney Islands where there is a useful correlation between climate risk and the density of EV charging infrastructure.
Professor Peter Hunter, University of Stirling, presented on ‘Forth-ERA: A digital environmental observatory for the Forth Valley and Scotland.’ This integrates sensor networks, satellite observations and models for environmental monitoring, and provides a real-world testbed where new methods can be developed. It will provide information for early warning & monitoring of floods & droughts using information such as soil moisture, rainfall radar and river level sensors, and in future data will be provided to blue light services when extreme events occur.
Dr Enrico Tubaldi, University of Strathclyde, discussed his work on ‘Improving models for the impact of floods on transport infrastructure assets’. Bridges are critical assets for any transport networks and his research is investigating alternative ways to monitor bridges and ways to move towards remote sensor strategies like RiverTrack, radars and cameras. Ultimately it will help with optimisation of the recovery of damaged road networks and include a road repair and scheduling model for resilient road recovery.
📸 Professor Campbell Booth, University of Strathclyde, spoke on the ENergy System dIGital twIN (ENSIGN) which seeks to map and predict the energy systems of the future. This is a complex task due to electrification of heat and transport in the UK, hydrogen, large scale industrial clusters, consumers working to modulate demand – and measures to meet Net Zero targets. Marion Samler from the DAFNI programme team sits on the advisory board. ENSIGN is an EPSRC Prosperity partnership – bringing together industry and academia to develop transformative new technology, to create an integrated energy system digital twin, and to create knowledge of future energy system behaviour.
📸 Professor David Flynn, University of Glasgow presented on the TransIT Research Hub – Digital Twinning for Transport Decarbonisation, a £46m research hub which is pushing forward efforts to decarbonise transport through digital twin technology. 70 partners in digital tech, energy networks and the transport sector are involved. Whole systems thinking will be used in efforts to decarbonise transport on time and within budget
Professor David Jenkins, Heriot-Watt University, spoke on ‘Using data to describe buildings within energy systems and policy’, with his research involving big data computational challenges as well as participatory engagement with users. His work focuses on energy demand in the built environment and energy system modelling. A variety of computational requirements are involved from quite high resolution spatial and temporal datasets which need to be correlated, to others where selecting the right data can be the tricky issue.
Dr Eky Febrianto, University of Glasgow discussed his research on the ‘Resilience of Railway Infrastructure through physics and data analytics’. The work uses a digital twin as a virtual testing facility and to stress test railway infrastructure against flooding, extreme heat, etc. It is aiming to make numerical models more efficient, to consider realistic material models, and to think about alternative geometry representations. It draws on parallel computing as well as physics models and considers future computing options.
Dr Desen Kirli also presented on behalf of Professor Sean Smith, University of Edinburgh, she presented his work on ‘Combining complex national buildings data for regulatory and compliance purposes’. Almost 40% of the 27 million homes in the UK do not have an Energy Performance Certificate. This lack causes a challenge in terms of insufficient data and analysis, which then affects tracking of policy, strategy and regulatory interventions, and impacts productivity. Sean and his co-authors have put forward 3 options to Scottish Government to better access data and make it available to policymakers.
Dr Connor McGarry, University of Strathclyde spoke on ‘Leveraging data in translating heating and transport energy demand futures into electricity system impacts’. The research aims to move from siloed models of transport, heating, and networks into a single coherent integrated modelling framework. It uses agent-based model outputs at different spatial resolutions to model scenarios on positive low energy futures and combines detailed analysis at street level for EVs and heat pumps to generate place-based contextualised modelling.
Dr Tahir Mahmood, University of the West of Scotland, spoke on ‘Exploring the Connection between AVCN and DAFNI’. AVCN is the university’s Research Institute focusing on AI, Virtual Communications & Networks. It includes areas such as 5G and beyond, Digital Connectivity and Innovation for Sustainable Futures, Creative Computing Technologies, and more. There are around 65 researchers in the group and as experts in AI and data analysis, they anticipate good collaborations between DAFNI and AVCN in projects where more data and computational power are required.
Dr Zhiwei Gao, University of Glasgow, discussed ‘Data-enhanced landslide modelling and prediction’. Over 32,000 people were killed by landslides between 2004 and 2010. The UK is not prone to landslides but Scotland is most affected when they do occur. His research uses data enhanced landslide modelling with a digital twin at city or slope scale. They hope to make their data available in DAFNI to allow it to be used by more people.
Workshops
The workshops on Day 2 focused on moderated discussions around current data sharing culture, approaches and benefits, and data sharing challenges and opportunities / solutions. Dr Joy Davidson of Digital Curation Centre, whose team moderated the discussions, presented the results of a pre workshop survey which showed that overwhelmingly people are sharing their data and culturally that desire is there. However, the amount of time and effort required to share data continues to present a challenge and concerns about privacy are holding people back. Research data infrastructures aren’t being used as much as they could be. The feedback from the workshops will be included in the report DAFNI presents to DSIT in March 2025 when it concludes this phase of the DAFNI DINI project.
Our thanks to DAFNI’s Science Lead, Tom Kirkham, for chairing the event. Special shout out to 📸 Katie Cartmell, Lyndsey Harding and Pam Slingsby for their superb event organisation! Thanks to our tech team: Sarah Byrne, Kyle Stevenson and Server Kasap for offering insights and guidance at the event, and thanks to our media manager, Catherine Dhanjal for social media and photography.
