Festival of Digital Research & Scholarship

Do you make use of the tools and technologies for data-intensive and/or computational research in your work? Then this event is for you!

Hosted by ARC, this will be a full-day event and evening celebration of all aspects of digitally-enabled research and scholarship with a series of keynotes, panel sessions, demonstrations & workshops, and presentations from ARC staff, students and our researcher colleagues from across UCL.

We will also be gathering ideas for new Digital Research Communities - so if you're a lone-worker or part of a small group/team working with a specific toolkit/software package/programming language/data management approach in your lab or department we'd love to see and speak with you, and help connect you with others across UCL.

Registration to Attend

Registration to attend has now closed - But don't let that put you off!

Walk-ins and passersby are more than welcome to join us and see what ARC and the UCL digital research community have to offer!

So, pop in to one of our presentation sessions, or drop-in to a workshop (see below)

Free Refreshments, Lunch and Evening Drinks + BBQ available to all attendees!

Programme

In addition to the below programme, Exhibitor tables and Posters will be on display in the North Cloisters, all day from 9.30am

More information regarding our workshops, including room location, pre-attendance requirements and support, can be found in the 'Workshops' section below 

Workshops

We will be running a number of Workshops through out the Festival day - some of which have pre-workshop requirements such as bringing your own laptop, downloading software, etc

To help us better facilitate these requirements and provide attendees with all necessary support we asked people to register their attendance. Registration is now closed. But! if you didn't manage to register in-time, don't worry - drop-ins will be welcomed!

Please bring your laptop and our workshop teams will endeavour to ensure you get the most from their expertise

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 platofrms, 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.

Attendance information

A couple of house-keeping items you should be aware of to make your arrival a smooth one

Main Campus Entry

The Festival will be hosted in the North Cloisters and surrounding rooms, located in UCL’s Main Campus Building - see below for map

Due to on-going protests within the main entrance of UCL grounds, there is currently a heightened level of security.

All UCL staff and students will be expected to bring their ID cards, and ‘tap’ accordingly at the entrance point

If you are attending as a ‘visitor’ to UCL, please inform the security staff you are ‘attending the Festival for Digital Research’ when prompted. Please download your Pretix ticket as you may be asked to show it. If you are unable to locate your ticketing email, please contact us ASAP and we will resend this to you.

Event Photographer

As noted during the registration process, photos and/or videos will be taken throughout the event and may be published to our website, social media, or other material.

If you do not wish for images and/or videos of you to be used for marketing and/or promotional purposes, please ensure to collect a red-dot sticker upon arrival to the Festival and wear this throughout the day.

Whilst you may still be inadvertently captured in a photo/video, the red-dot will serve as an indication for us not use these photos.

Red-dot stickers can be collected from our Festival Support Team

Festival Support Team

Our team will be onsite all day to ensure you have an enjoyable Festival.

As well as fulfilling a range of ‘behind-the-scenes’ tasks, they will be able to answer your programme queries, direct you to the correct room/area, and more.

The Festival Support Team will be identifiable by wearing 'ARC' stickers

Additional information

Prizes will be awarded for best poster and presentation across the topics/themes, with the winners having been voted for by attendees

1st prize: £200 amazon gift voucher

2nd prize: £125 amazon gift voucher

Registration for event attendance is now open!

See our Events page for all other ARC hosted and partnered events

Map