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Welcome to the virtual recap of UCL's inaugural Festival of Digital Research & Scholarship, hosted by ARC
In June 2024, we were delighted to welcome you all to our first ever Festival of Digital Research & Scholarship!
A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to showcase their work and all those who attended! The day was a huge success, packed with a wide variety of Keynotes, Presentations, Posters, and Exhibitor Tables, celebrating the vast range of research and scholarship the UCL digital community has to offer and connecting like-minded teams and people across UCL
Facilitated by our ARC experts, Workshops offered light introductions to and demonstrations of programming languages, research tools, and key programming features.
Throughout the day, we asked all attendees to vote on best poster and best presentation. Head to the virtual 'Featured Presentations' and 'Poster Exhibition' to see the winners!
We hope you enjoyed the day and look forward to seeing you all next year!
In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news and events across UCL's digital research space
The Festival in numbers
Programme revisit
| Opening Plenary | Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0930 | Welcome Coffee & Registration - available from the North Cloisters | ||||
| 1000 | Festival Opening & Welcome Speech | ||||
| 1030 | Keynote One: 'Open Science - a brave new world' by Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services) | ||||
| 1050 | Keynote Two: 'A Tale of Digital Shapeshifting – Lessons from the Hartree Centre', by Alison Kennedy, The Hartree Centre | ||||
| 1115 | From Anti-racism to Decolonisation | Sam Ahern | ||||
| COFFEE BREAK from 1130am | North Cloisters & Wilkins Terrace | |||||
Parallel Presentation Session 1: Sensors & Data 1 Jeremy Bentham Room | Parallel Presentation Session 2: AI & HPC Physics A1/3 Lecture Theatre | Parallel Workshops: Morning Session See 'Workshops' below for rooms locations | |||
| 1200 | Open Scholarship: The challenges in building meaningful models with publicly available omics | 1200 | Benchmarking for the exascale | 1130 (1.5hrs) | Julia: A fresh approach to scientific computing |
| 1215 | Utilising IoT sensors to understand the environmental performance of NHS eye clinics | 1215 | Speeding up numerical computations | 1130 (1.5hrs) | Python: Tooling recommendations and a package template for Python research software packages |
| 1230 | Association between digital biomarkers and anxiety: a systematic review and meta-analysis | 1230 | Machine Learning framework for patient specific simulations of the impact of metastatic cancer in the spine | 1130 (1.5hrs) | Contender: Novel architecture machines |
| 1245 | Preliminary investigation of excitation/inhibition balance in visual snow syndrome through the Virtual Brain | 1245 | Comparative study of Generative AI (ChatGPT) vs Human in generating multiple choice questions based on the PIRLS reading assessment framework | ||
| LUNCH BUFFET from 1pm | North Cloisters & Wilkins Terrace | |||||
Parallel Presentation Session 3: Sensor & Data 2 Jeremy Bentham Room | Parallel Presentation Session 4: Enabling Digital Research Physics A1/3 Lecture Theatre | Parallel Workshops: Morning Session See 'Workshops' below for rooms locations | |||
| 1345 | Continent wide Topogeometric models and space syntax | 1345 | What is an OPSO and why do we need on in UCL? | 1345 (40mins) | The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base: Exploring cultural heritage collections |
| 1400 | Automated participant recruitment for survey studies | 1400 | ARC Education: Who, what, why and how? | 1400 (1.5hrs) | Python: Tooling recommendations and a package template for Python research software packages |
| 1415 | Sustainable Digital Twins: Assessing the impact of UCL IoT data | 1415 | Identity, epistemic virtues and professional development in the context of the digital transformation of research communities | 1400 (1.5hrs) | Contender: Novel architecture machines |
| 1430 | Science to the rescue: Computational approaches to scale-up insight to case study data on public attitudes to technology | 1430 | Developing the digital research infrastructure ecosystem to explore the early universe | 1430 (1.5hrs) | Julia: A fresh approach to scientific computing |
| 1445 | A DEM-based analysis of micromechanical behavior of hydrate bearing sediment in the South China sea | 1445 | Stop, Collaborate and Listen: how to reduce wasted RSE effort | ||
| COFFEE BREAK from 3pm | North Cloisters & Wilkins Terrace | |||||
| Closing Plenary | Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre | |||||
| 1530 | Closing Keynote: Allison Littlejohn, Director of The UCL Knowledge Lab and Chair of the UCL Digital Research & Innovation Board | ||||
| 1550 | Introducing.... session, including; UCL's Research Culture Community Steering Group; Grand Challenges; Data Empowered Societies; CDT; Introducing ARC's Digital Research Community | ||||
| 1630 | Poster Prizes and Close | ||||
| EVENING DRINKS + BBQ from 5pm (Sponsored by Logicalis) - North Cloisters & Wilkins Terrace | |||||
Workshops
- JULIA: A fresh approach to scientific computing | G02, North West Wing
Morning session: 1130-1300
Afternoon session: 1430-1600
Location: G02, North West Wing
Julia is a modern, dynamic, general-purpose, compiled programming language. It's interactive, can be used in a REPL or notebooks. While designed for generic programming, it is particularly well suited for numerical and scientific computing, including simulating differential equations, numerical optimisation, machine learning and differentiable programming.
In this workshop we will give a light introduction to the Julia programming language, focusing on the features which make it a good fit for research software. Consisting of an initial demonstration of some key features and the interactive notebook programming environment Pluto (https://plutojl.org/), experts from ARC will facilitate a hands-on, Julia try-out session using an example scientific computing task.
- PYTHON: Tooling recommendations and a package template for Python research software projects | Haldane Room
Morning session: 1130-1300
Afternoon session: 1400-1530
Location: Haldane Room, Main Building
The Python programming language is widely used in digital research and scholarship, due to its ease of use, wide ecosystem of existing libraries and open-source licencing. Python packages are a way to organize Python code into reusable components, and so vital to building sustainable research software. A common dilemma faced by researchers using Python is the paralysis of choice of tools available for developing, testing, documenting and benchmarking Python packages - making it unclear what constitutes a good choice of tools.
Showcasing a project started by UCL's Centre for Advanced Research Computing, and using our tooling recommendations and a Pyhton cookiecutter template, we will demonstrate how to quickly & easily set-up a new Python project while adhering to good research software development practices - including automated testing, dependency management and documentation out of the box.
- CONTENDER: Novel Architecture Machines in ARC | North Cloisters
Morning session: 1130-1300
Afternoon session: 1400-1530
Location: North Cloisters, Main Building
As Moore's Law fails and an increasing variety of machine learing accelerators become available, students and practitioners of machine learning will need to become familiar with these technologies to inform their decisions about which platforms to use.
Graphcore are an innovative UK company who make accelerator systems for machine learning. Project Contender at UCL's Centre For Advanced Research Computing (ARC) has a Graphcore IPU-POD 16 Direct Attach system - programmable using their own extensions to PyTorch called PopTorch.
Primarily for those who develop machine learning models in PyTorch and who are interested in using different platforms, the workshop will demonstrate how to run a simple PyTorch program on our Graphcore (https://www.graphcore.ai/) novel AI accelerator machine. As an introduction to this and to these machines generally, attendees will convert a simple PyTorch machine learning code to PopTorch and run it on our Graphcore machine.
- The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base: Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections | G02, North West Wing
Single session: 1345-1430
Location: G02, North West Wing
The evolving landscape of digital research methodologies and technologies offers a unique opportunity for exploring and understanding cultural heritage collections and asking new and different questions of them.
The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base (KB), a homogeneous data environment, uses formal semantics to allow data integration, semantic enrichment, and knowledge discovery across a disparate set of resources. The most fundamental challenge is the provision of a suitable semantic metadata schema for unifying catalogues and building knowledge graphs to facilitate resourceful query and visualisation. Most museum catalogues are object-centric, but the Sloane Lab’s approach is record-centric, meaning the record is the central entity that we represent - facilitating the expression of multivocality. The KB is based on Semantic Web standards (RDF/S, OWL) and our data model is built on top of the CIDOC CRM.
Presented via a case study, the workshop will focus on the intersections between cultural heritage and technology, underscoring the critical concept of 'Collections as Data' and the potential of data-driven research methods in enhancing the accessibility, interpretability, discovery and analysis of collections. It will provide a rich insight into the design and development, our modelling choices and the challenges we addressed, including data disparity, integration facilities, inconsistency, uncertainty, and data absences.