Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange NetworkPlus launched

This Knowledge Exchange and Communications NetworkPlus (KEC NetworkPlus) looks to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and sustainable collaboration across the UK’s digital research infrastructure, broaden participation in computational practices, and help showcase the strength of UK activities in this area.

The UK is a powerhouse for Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI), with many different activities happening across a wide range of areas. However, these successes are not always perfectly aligned or completely joined up. One purpose of CAKE is to enable the community to better understand the landscape in which we operate and for this network to act as a conduit to share skills and outcomes, ultimately reducing duplication of effort and resulting in greater impact from activities.

The other objective of this NetworkPlus is to ensure the UK’s DRI is well represented globally, with the outcomes of work undertaken in the UK promoted to and, ideally, adopted by others in the wider world, and people in the UK connected with global trends and technologies. Ultimately this will showcase the UK’s capabilities and drive international collaboration.

When CAKE concludes in three years' time, we aim to have:

• United diverse communities who are involved in DRI
• Represented UK advancements at national and international events
• Helped the sharing of best practice across the community.

We have several plans to help us achieve these aims. In the autumn a call for DRI Knowledge Exchange Fellows will be published. This will be the first of several calls, which will assemble a wide-ranging group of individuals interested in promoting knowledge exchange in their specific area. Fellows will be awarded funds to support these activities. 

We will also run a programme of global placements and exchange visits, providing funding to bring people together, whether within the UK or as teams from across the world, to work together on specific problems. 

Lastly, we will run several retreats. These will focus on specific, though fairly broad-ranging, technical topics and will look to bring together a group of individuals who can pool their complementary skills to help address one of many grand challenges in the field. 

More details on all these activities will be posted on the CAKE website.

Links

More information can be found at https://cake-dri.github.io/

The Knowledge Exchange and Communications NetworkPlus (KEC NetworkPlus) was launched as part of the UK's new compute map. See Government and UKRI launch compute roadmap.