Festival of Digital Research, Innovation & Scholarship

Attendance Registration- Now Open

Do you make use of 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.

Join us on the 15^th July 2025 to celebrate all things digital research at UCL.  

If you make use of digital tools and technologies: software, data, sensors, AI, machine learning, big data, python, HPC, digital twins and much more, then come and share your research and help us celebrate!

The call for submissions has now closed, tickets to attend are still available.

This event is currently in the planning stages. We will provide updates and more details as soon as they become available. Keep an eye out for further announcements and sign up to our mailing list  for notifications

Register to Attend

Registration is now open! 

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 

Programme

More information regarding our workshops, including room location, pre-attendance requirements and support is coming soon. 

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 open please register to attend here!

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

Computational tools for probabilistic modelling and statistical inference 

Single session: 11:15-12:40

Location: TBC

Probabilistic models are used across a wide range of research domains and there is a plethora of computational tools for constructing such models, fitting them to data and making predictions using them. This workshop will aim to bring together researchers across UCL who both use and develop statistical software tools. It will combine demonstrations of software packages, talks on applications of statistical tools and a discussion session where participants will be invited to flag gaps they have found in the current statistical tool landscape and areas they would like to see new tools being developed.  

 

Python-tooling: transforming Python scripts into a Python package with good software engineering practices 

Single session: 11:15-12:40

Location: TBC

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. In this workshop we will showcase a project `python-tooling` started by UCL's Advanced Research Computing Centre to help researchers convert their scripts into a full-fledged Python package, combining a [website](https://github-pages.arc.ucl.ac.uk/python-tooling) and a [cookiecutter template](https://github.com/cookiecutter/cookiecutter). The workshop will consist of a demostration of how to use the template to set up a new project followed by a change for participants to try out the tools themselves and get advice on how to use in their own projects.

 

SAFEHR  Introduction to hospital data & the OMOP Common Data Model in R

Single session: 11:15 - 12:40

Location: TBC

This workshop will introduce participants to the OMOP Common Data Model, which is becoming the de-facto standard for sharing patient records. We will also introduce R, a widely used statistical analysis tool, and give some examples of using OMOP data within this tool.

 

Narrating FAIR: recognising and rewarding FAIR practices and the use of narrative CVs

Single session: 11:15 - 12:40

Location: TBC

An interactive workshop for those with line management rsponsibilities to:

- Recognise benefits of FAIR practices

- Recognise FAIR on Narrative CVs

- Construct an example Narrative CV for your area demonstrating FAIR

- Express ways forward in recognising and rewarding FAIR in your contex

 

Interoperable infrastructures: Community standards in Longitudinal Population Studies

Single session: 13:30 - 14:30

Location: TBC

This workshop will demonstrate the uses and possibilities of CLOSER Discovery - the UK's most comprehensive research tool for longitudinal population studies (LPS), which provides a single point of entry to rich questionnaire and dataset metadata for 13 UK LPS. It is the only tool that allows you to search across UK LPS to identify similar questions asked of participants, variables on a particular topic, and how variables were measured in the original questionnaires. In this workshop, you will learn how to search, explore, and assess UK LPS data using this free-to-access research tool.

CLOSER Discovery: https://discovery.closer.ac.uk/

CLOSER: https://closer.ac.uk/

 

First contribution to open-source software workshop

Single session: 13:30 - 14:30

Location: TBC

Many of the software and tools we use every day in our research are open-source community projects. Can you imagine doing a data science project without Pandas or R? Could you imagine making plots and visualisations without Matplotlib or Plotly? Could you imagine writing a paper without LaTeX or Overleaf?

These and many other cornerstones of research software are all open-source and community-driven. They rely on bug reports and fixes from a community of volunteers and researchers.

This workshop is a hands-on introduction to making contributions to open-source software. We'll take you through the steps of identifying a project you rely on, finding a "good first issue" and making your first contribution; be that a pull request, bug report, or simply an improvement to some documentation. Contributing to open-source software projects is a great way to give back to the scientific research software community, build your coding skills, and gain recognition.

We'll be coding together in small groups, and there will be experienced open-source contributors from UCL on hand to help guide you through. Want to come but no idea what to contribute to?! There'll be a curated list of "good first issue"s from projects we maintain or frequently contribute to so you can get stuck in!

Conversational Interfaces for Research: Transforming Data Interaction with LLMs and MCP

Single session: 13:30 - 14:30

Location: TBC

What if the future of software delivery didn’t involve a user interface at all? With the rise of large language models (LLMs), we’re entering a new era where software can be consumed through natural conversation, not clicks. In this walkthrough, I’ll introduce the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a new way to expose real-time, typed, dynamic data to LLMs, enabling them to act as intelligent, conversational front-ends for research software.

I’ll demonstrate how to use MCP, but also how to build a simple MCP server that exposes live data and commands to an LLM, transforming a traditional API into a human-friendly interaction. Along the way, we’ll look at what problems this approach is suited for, how it compares to conventional apps, and what design patterns are emerging.

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 Roberts Building and surrounding rooms, located in UCL’s Main Campus Building - see below for map

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

Categories: 

Best poster from a PhD student: 

Best presentation from a PhD student

Best poster from a PostDoc researcher

Best presentation from a PostDoc researcher

Best idea for a Digital Research Community

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

Map