The NERC #DG23 ‘Digital Gathering 23’ Hackathon event finishes

The NERC Digital Gathering #DG23 Hackathon event, held following the conference has now finished. We adopted a ‘collaborative’ approach to this year’s hackathon, with two groups of experienced instructors helping to facilitate the delegates to use the software tools and computational environments on offer to further their research. Expert Network member Prof. Richard Reeve and […]

The NERC #DG23 ‘Digital Gathering’ Hackathon now underway

Following the successful #DG23 Digital Gathering conference, comes the the ‘Constructing a Digital Environment’ Digital Gathering 23 Hackathon, where the first day has now completed (https://lnkd.in/ewmVU7FW). Held at Churchill College, Cambridge, the hackathon is led by Digital Environment Expert Network member Prof Richard Reeve, Professor of Population and Ecosystem Health and team from the University of Glasgow, […]

CDE Webinar – Dr Peter Battaglia, DeepMind. GraphCast: Learning skillful medium-range global weather forecasting

Dr Peter Battaglia, Google DeepMind provided a presentation on the use of AI in medium range global weather forecasting. Peter Battaglia is a Research Scientist/Director at DeepMind. His work focuses on approaches for modelling and reasoning about complex systems, by combining richly structured knowledge with flexible learning algorithms. In this webinar, Peter presented his recent […]

CDE Webinar – Dr Sari Giering NOC and Dr Robert Blackwell CEFAS Are plankton nets a thing of the past? How we can use AI for real-time high-resolution plankton monitoring?

Dr Sari Giering, NOC and Dr Robert Blackwell, CEFAS provided a joint overview of the role and opportunity of AI in oceanic plankton monitoring. Sari is a researcher at the National Oceanography Centre. Her research interests focus on how marine organisms influence the capacity of the ocean to store carbon. Her research combines shipboard measurements, […]

Natural Language Processing – Vader sentiment analysis with NLTK

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) (https://www.nltk.org) provides an excellent starting point for natural language processing projects. In this blog we wanted to explore the creation and use of a custom docker image to allow one of the components of NLTK, that is the VADER sentiment analysis tool (https://www.nltk.org/_modules/nltk/sentiment/vader.html). A key advantage of VADER (Valence Aware […]

Jetson Nano – Object Detection and Image Classification

In our previous blog (https://digitalenvironment.org/the-nvidia-jetson-nano-first-look-and-setup) we explored setting up and running the amazing Jetson Nano Developer Kit from NVIDIA. This little unit is capable of about half a teraflop of floating point calculations using its Maxwell accelerated GPU processor – pretty impressive for a low cost unit. In this blog we were following the ‘Two […]

Using Docker with bind mount points

Docker, https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview, is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker enables separation of ‘containerised’ applications from local computing infrastructure. It’s a popular way of preparing programmes to share with others (https://hub.docker.com) and to run on remote computers also. Using docker means not having to have complex software server applications installed locally. Instead […]

Sharing Jupyter Notebooks with Binder

One of the great developments in data science is undoubtedly the ‘Notebook’ approach to working through data problems. Of these, the Jupyter Notebook is the best known, although others exist also such as Zeppelin. Notebooks allow you to create a single reference document holding data, markdown text, code and graphical outputs – all in one […]

Data Visualisation Tools

A key extension to undertaking data analysis is the effective communication of the subsequent results, helping interested parties understand clearly the analytical outcomes. The very act of visualising data can also itself play a key role in the interpretation and understanding of data. In this blog, we gather together and discuss a range of data […]

Facial Expression Recognition Demonstrator

In this post, we describe the development of a further demonstrator for an exhibition we are planning using a Raspberry Pi. The Digital Environment team are planning to be in support of NERC in attending the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual conference and exhibition in Seattle, USA in February 2020, and are making […]