Celebrating our inaugural Welsh roadshow
Diolch yn fawr i bob un ohonoch a ymunodd â ni yn sioe deithiol Cymru DAFNI yn Abertawe yn ddiweddar.
Thank you to everyone who joined us at the inaugural DAFNI Wales roadshow recently where we discussed research into infrastructure systems and the challenges and opportunities of data sharing!
Roedd yn ddefnyddiol iawn i glwyed eich syniadau ar pwnciau ymchwil sy’n arwain y byd i systemau seilwaith.
Our thanks to Computational Foundry, Swansea University / Ffowndri Gyfrifiadol Prifysgol Abertawe and Clare Wood, Associate Professor at Swansea University and Civil Engineering Programmes Director for hosting us from 16-17 September 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 Wales.
📸 Our opening talk was delivered by Professor Perumal Nithiarasu, Associate Dean of Research, Innovation and Impact within the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University who introduced the university’s key research themes and programmes, from the Climate Action Research Institute (CARI) to their involvement in the Welsh Digital Twin Network whose conference is being held on 17th December in Bangor.
📸 Our keynote presentation on the first day was delivered by Glyn Jones, Chief Digital Officer, Welsh Government, who noted that we are in an uncertain world where data can help us. We need to prepare for the future and ensure our infrastructure and our decisions are fit for the future and the right ones. He commented that DAFNI can help us share data, models, and research to help develop data, modelling, AI and Digital Twins to help Wales become more resilient. They are keen to explore how they can maximise access to DAFNI and unlock the opportunities of DAFNI to collaborate and innovate, such as developing better methods for quantifying outcomes, perhaps by building models in DAFNI to build better links between investments and outcomes in DAFNI.
📸 Olly Tones, Head of Data Sharing and Technology, gave the programme overview for Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, he noted that whilst barriers to data access and data sharing are well known, coherence, vision and central coordination are crucial. Subject matter expertise is needed alongside technology skills, he commented, with stewardship and curation work being essential alongside the technology. He added that we need to find a way to open up government datasets safely and for the benefit of all, and that DAFNI and DINI should provide the expertise and the insights for this.
📸 Our Data Sharing keynote was delivered by Tom Crick MBE, Chief Scientific Adviser at Department of Culture, Media and Sport who is the Lead for Scientific Engineering in the DCMS £multimillion R&D department, which is also responsible for AI and innovation. He is also Professor at Swansea University. He has had interactions with DAFNI for a number of years and is interested in interdiscipliniarity of solutions to problems. He noted that government and industry needs to use advanced modelling techniques and data architecture to make better decisions. He said, “we live in a data and computationally driven society now, the wider DINI work is of massive interest and part of what must run through DINI is the ‘data for the public good’ as a key theme.”
13 lightning talks from Welsh Universities highlighted a fascinating range of research themes and how DAFNI might be used to further their research.
Bangor University
🗣️Dr Panagiotis (Panos) D. Ritsos presented on Visualisation, XReality and Analytics at the XRVA Laboratory whose work combines augmented reality with interactive visualisation of data and analytics in the space of ubiquitous analysis. They have built a number of visualisation toolkits using web technologies, and visualisations using voice commands. They plan to use DAFNI for visualisations in the future and noted that they see DAFNI as an all-encompassing platform.
🗣️ Dr Sopan Patil spoke on Digital Twins for Natural Flood Management whose approach is highly scalable. He noted that a platform like DAFNI is perfect for storing and disseminating his research data on areas such as natural flood management techniques using trees and canopy interception, and how climate and land-use change will affect the hydrological response of river basins. He added that he anticipates that DAFNI can help upscale the storage and display of data streams from multiple sensors.
📸 Dr Tessa Davey discussed Digital Twins to design low carbon energy networks for the future – she focussed her talk mainly on fission energy and the need to decarbonise energy sources etc to reach Net Zero by 2050. She discussed the heat park concept where nuclear co-generation allows otherwise wasted heat by-products to be used in area heating or steel making, for example. She is interested in developing a Digital Twin heat park with DAFNI which would link physical models (reactor thermal hydraulics, heat transfer, thermodynamics), process models and financial models
University of Wales Trinity Saint David
🗣️Dr Kelvin Donne spoke on the Wales Automotive Glass Research Centre (WAGRC) whose work includes computational modelling of fractures and chips and who are starting to move into using larger datasets as they start to study the implications of climate change on the auto glass business due to changes in vehicle design and the move to electrification.
🗣️Dr Tim Bashford talked about the ARIA/Vox Lab, part of the Wales Institute for Digital Information (WIDI), working on research and innovation within digital healthcare. The ARIA project is modelling respiratory audio to assist respiratory clinicians with earlier identification of lung function and respiratory disease such as COPD, asthma and long Covid. Their Trusted Research Environment consists of trilingual recorded voice samples, from people with and without respiratory diseases, in English, Welsh and Catalan.
Cardiff University
🗣️ Professor Monjur Mourshed spoke on Digital Twins of the UK Building stock and 2050 pathways modelling whose work includes mapping thermal and electrical generation for a representative set of buildings across the UK, modelling human behaviour as well as thermal behaviour of the buildings. Their work seeks to capture the socio economic revolution as well as to inform better strategies for cooling buildings, such as ventilation, shading and openings.
📸 Dr Steven Lind introduced numerical modelling for offshore renewable energy, he uses modelling at device level as part of the Cardiff Marine Energy Research Group, for example to model breaking wave forces which are critical to assess the survivability of such devices. An upcoming focus will be on structural response of renewable energy systems under extreme flow conditions.
Swansea University
🗣️Professor Markus Roggenbach spoke on the Swansea Rail Verification Group, whose aim is to help deliver smart and green rail transport, novel safety and security assurance processes. Their work includes modelling rail scheme plans to identify whether a scheme is well designed or incomprehensible, and how to make them accessible to engineers. They use test data and genetic algorithms to identify problem areas with the schemas.
🗣️Dr Yue Hou introduced physics informed machine learning in transportation infrastructure engineering – conducting intelligent analysis for a high speed railway infrastructure and how to identify the deterioration of the infrastructure. They recently used large language model to analyse time series data – for fast and timely detection of irregularities for railway engineers. Their work needs to encompass both engineering and science and they hope to bridge them with DAFNI.
🗣️Dr William Bennett talked on behalf of the Energy and Environment group on computational modelling of coastal process, river dynamics, flooding etc! They are using a wide range of models to simulate and predict hydro environmental systems across a wide range of time and space scales.
🗣️Dr Richard Lewis spoke about the SPECIFIC Active Buildings Project, which focuses on how to use buildings to be part of the energy infrastructure and contribute to energy reductions, energy savings and Net Zero. Their research includes building integrated technologies – chemistry and materials, forecasting of solar resources, and energy storage optimisation.
University of South Wales
📸 Dr Leshan Uggalla discussed space at the University of South Wales, whose research includes the area of space surveillance, with the threats posed by debris already in space. He discussed modelling in areas such as atmospheric impacts on millimetre wave signal propagation over short and medium ranges, and environmental monitoring to see how devices perform in rain, snow, the size and angle of the rain drops, impact of wind, and so on.
🗣️Dr Sivanthan Sivagunalan spoke on Highly Optimised Solar Tracking System for Enhanced Power Generation and Support Agrivoltaics Farming, with a focus on how to improve solar energy and generate panels from smaller PV panels, this involves electronics and mechanical systems and tracking how to optimise solar generation and highest radiation available. They are evaluating using DAFNI for the data they collect and visualise, and to share the data with external partners.
DAFNI technical overview
🗣️Dr Jens Jensen, Interim DAFNI team lead, presented a technical overview of DAFNI, showing how researchers can use the platform for collaboration, data sharing and access, modelling, publishing and visualisation.
Day two
📸 On the second day we focused on the DAFNI DINI project (Data Infrastructure for National Infrastructure)where 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.
In addition to the workshops moderated by Digital Curation Centre at the Swansea workshop, and at the upcoming Glasgow and Belfast workshops, DAFNI has set up an Expert Advisory Group, is working with two Centre of Excellence grant holders to write reports on elements, has commissioned three Champion projects with the Strategy board, amongst other facets.
Our thanks to DAFNI’s Science Lead, Tom Kirkham, for chairing the event and diolch to our media manager, Catherine Dhanjal for a warm welcome in Welsh. Special shout out to Katie Cartmell, Lyndsey Harding and Pam Slingsby for their superb event organisation!