News

26.-30. August, 2024

DAPHNE @ "15th International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation"

The opening of the 15th International Conference on Synchrotron Radiation Instrumentation (SRI), held from August 26 to 30, 2024, at the CCH Congress Center in Hamburg, is a significant event. Over 1,000 experts from around the world gather at this prestigious event, recognized as the world's leading forum for the advancement of major X-ray radiation sources.

The opening on August 27 was officially conducted by the Second Mayor and Hamburg Senator for Science, Research and Equality, Katharina Fegebank, as well as the Schleswig-Holstein Minister for Education, Science, Research, and Culture, Karin Prien.

This afternoon, we are looking forward to an exciting talk by Anna Zimina titled: "Demand on Advanced Operando Characterization on Industrial Relevant Catalysts Using Combination of X-rays Based". On Friday, another highlight will follow as Lisa Amelung presents the talk "DAPHNE4NFDI - improving research data management at Synchrotron Facilities".

We would also like to highlight the visit of NFDI Director York Sure-Vetter to the booth of our consortium DAPHNE4NFDI. We are proud to be part of this important initiative to improve the transparency, FAIRness, and reusability of data at photon and neutron sources.

More information:

SRI2024
Program SRI 2024 (26-30. August 2024): Tagesordnung · DESY-Konferenzverwaltung (Indico)

11.-13. March, 2024

Join us! DAPHNE4NFDI Annual Meeting 11.-13.03.2024 in Dresden 

Before your calendar gets too busy, we would like you to register for our upcoming DAPHNE4NFDI Annual Meeting 2024 in Dresden.

Event venue The meeting will take place in-person on the main campus of Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf HZDR from March 11^th to March 13^th, 2024.

Agenda: The three-day event aims to cover a spectrum of topics including updates and highlights from DAPHNE4NFDI`s different task areas and use cases concerning metadata, ELNs, data analysis software, machine learning, and much more. We will have flash talks, cross-cutting parallel sessions and networking events.

Registration and more information: https://events.hifis.net/e/DAPHNE4NFDI_2024

15. November, 2023

Astrid Schneidewind new chair of the European Neutron Scattering Association (ENSA)

The European Neutron Scattering Association met on 15^th November and elected Astrid Schneidewind (Forschungszentrum Jülich) as the new chair. Congratulations to our co-spokeperson Astrid for her new role!

13-14. November, 2023

DAPHNE4NFDI-ENSA-ESUO European Data Policy Meeting

The DAPHNE4NFDI-ENSA-ESUO European Data Policy Meeting took place at PSI on 13-14 November, 2023.

The European users’ organizations ENSA and ESUO in collaboration with the DAPHNE4NFDI consortium met to discuss  implications of FAIR data and Open Data policy for the European PaN community. The purpose of this meeting was to involve the users via their national representatives in ENSA and ESUO to get as wide as possible an input and discuss the issues from differing national user communities’ perspectives, with the final objective of developing a “white paper” addressing the topics and challenges in the process of FAIR implementation in the PaN facilities. More than 50 participants including ESUO and ENSA delegates from different countries and DAPHNE4NFDI members attended the meeting.

The first day started with talks related with “Open Data Policies”, followed by an overview on the OSCARS, ExPaNDS | PaNOSC and DAPHNE4NFDI projects. Afterwards an exchange was held on the outcome of the Open data survey initiated by ESUO and ENSA. The Open Science White Paper topic strongly motivated the participants, who were divided into parallel working groups for discussion. The five working groups focused on:

The second day new working groups were organized and the discussions on the mentioned topics continued with a final report on the outcomes of the different working groups and how these could be implemented to the Open Science White Paper.  The meeting finished with an overview on how to proceed on the Open Science White Paper.

03. November, 2023

Christian Gutt and Birgitt Kanngießer new chair and vice chair of the KFS

On 3^rd November 2023, the constituent meeting of the Committee Research with Synchrotron Radiation elected Christian Gutt (University of Siegen) and Birgitt Kanngießer (Technische Universität Berlin) as the new chair and vice chair of the Committee. Congratulations to our co-spokepeople for their new role!

24.-25 October 2023

SciCat Coding Marathon with Max Novelli at the ESS

Important topics for DESY/DAPHNE4NFDI were discussed, hands-on work on Release 4.4 was carried out and the collaboration was strengthened through personal contact. Present were (from left to right): Marco Leorato (MaxIV), Daphne van Dijken (MaxIV), Max Novelli (ESS), Nicolas Hayen (CAU Kiel) and Regina Hinzmann (DESY), joined online by Spencer Bliven (PSI) and Despina Adamopoulou (EMPA). It was a very productive two days!

12-14. September, 2023

DAPHNE4NFDI @ "1^st Conference on Research Data Infrastructure"

The Association “German National Research Data Infrastructure” promoted, from September 12^th to 14^th 2023, the “First Conference on Research Data Infrastructure”. The conference, hosted in Karlsruhe, gathered 760 participants from a wide variety of different communities, with several international stakeholders presents. Over the course of the three days, the most recent developments in research data management and related tools were presented and discussed in a passionate and lively way. The participants were also inspired by two exciting keynote lectures, by Distinguished Professor Christine L. Borgman (University of California, Los Angeles) and Dr. Mark D Wilkinson (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid).

Prof. Borgman critically discussed the concept of research data and the value associated to this, highlighting not only the strengths of the global efforts in improving RD infrastructure, but also their shortcomings and the necessary steps, also cultural, for an improved transition towards effective RDM. Dr. Mark Wilkinson, the lead author in the seminal paper discussing the FAIR Data Principles, reconstructed the story of how some of these principles came to be and how the successive developments led him to rethink about some. He also outlined the challenges but especially benefits of FAIR in-practice.

A different but nonetheless inspiring approach was explored during the public lecture given by artist Julia Janssen. Through a voyage through her everyday life, she evidenced the influence of digitalization and information technology on our society, with a particular eye with respect to data sovereignty and the struggles for a proper management of transparency and control over personal data.

DAPHNE4NFDI was present with 15 delegates, which contributed not only with four posters, but especially with an equal number of oral presentations. DAPHNE4NFDI speaker (statutes) Bridget Murphy presented the consortium to the audience, describing its aim, methods and also evidencing the strong synergy with the PUNCH4NFDI consortium, in a talk entitled “The DAPHNE4NFDI and PUNCH4NFDI Consortia in the NFDI”. More details about the technical solutions and RDM approaches exploited in DAPHNE4NFDI were for example given by Oliver Knodel and Paolo Dolcet. Through the example of HZDR, Oliver Knodel discussed how the Heliport RDM environment can be used to successfully follow and manage experiments from simple experiments on a lab scale to those carried out by large teams on large-scale facilities. Paolo Dolcet, on the other hand, discussed the needs, from a user perspective, that lead to the development of an electronic lab notebook that can collect the complex and rich data structure associated with the development of heterogenous catalysts, ranging from the synthesis to advance operando experiments with synchrotron radiation.

Overall, these contributions not only showcased the ideas and workflows developed within the consortium, but also highlighted the synergies of DAPHNE4NFDI with other NFDI consortia, e.g. PUNCH4NFDI, NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Cat. Lively exchange of ideas occurred and technical solutions were discussed with the members of other consortia visiting the DAPHNE4NFDI booth, strengthening the aforementioned synergies or opening the paths towards new collaborations and exchanges.

24-25. April, 2023

DAPHNE4NFDI @ "Datenräume in Deutschland und Europa gestalten"

From April 24^th to 25^th, 2023, DAPHNE4NFDI was present with two representatives at the event "Datenräume in Deutschland und Europa gestalten - Impulse der Wissenschaft". The event, which was jointly organized by the German Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) and the Volkswagen Foundation, consisted of numerous lectures, workshops and discussions and was very well suited to bring in the perspective of researchers from the fields of neutron and photon experiments. In addition, there was an exchange with other NFDI consortia, which presented themselves together with the NFDI office at a booth.

3-5. April, 2023

DAPHNE4NFDI Annual meeting

From April 3^rd to 5^th 2023, more than 90 participants and enthusiasts of the DAPHNE4NFDI consortium met on the DESY campus in Hamburg for the annual status meeting of the DFG-funded project “Data from Photon and Neutron Experiments for NFDI” (DAPHNE4NFDI). Overall, 25 different German and European institutions were represented on-site.

The meeting opened on April 3^rd with an internal session in which the members explored "White papers" in discussion rounds and engaged in passionate exchange of ideas and thoughts during round table discussions on selected wide interest topics (e.g., use cases, metadata, ELNs, RDMs). The discussions moved on after a "wrap up" to a discussion over snacks in front of about 40 detailed posters. The first day closed with a very insightful and inspiring public lecture by Andrea Thorn, entitled "The Coronavirus Structural Task Force: Open Data in Structural Biology", dealing with the struggles of determining the structure of the COVID-19 virus and the importance of open data towards the aim. It was impressive to see how a group of more than 30 - mostly young scientists - worked on a common goal for several years and how numerous structures were significantly improved and errors in the literature were avoided at an early stage in dialogue with the publishing groups.

The internal meeting continued on April 4^th in the morning with parallel sessions, covering aspects like data analysis software, deep learning, metadata, training platforms, etc. The technical advisory board gave valuable recommendations during detailed discussions about sample PID, data storage and especially SciCat. 

In the afternoon, the official open meeting started with the presentation of the DAPHNE4NFDI to the wider audience. Impressive developments in machine learning, autonomous experiments and data concepts in Munich (MLZ), Dresden (HZDR) and Hamburg/Schenefeld (EuXFEL) were presented. The second afternoon session with the European initiatives ExPANDS, OSCARS and the event programme of the ErUM Data Hub with workshop and schools also aroused particular interest. This open programme, which also attracted participants from Facilities and related activities, continued, also on the next day, with a welcome by Prof. Edgar Weckert, Director of Photon Science at DESY, and with another four exciting talks ranging from electronic lab books and data management to reference databases.

Overall the meeting fostered very fruitful and constructive discussions and stimulated the exchange of ideas among scientists with different approaches to common problems, leading to new inputs and concepts for the upcoming months.

January 22, 2023

New Deep Learning Workshops

In 2023, the ErUM Data Hub will host exciting workshops and schools in collaboration with DIG-UM. The events are aimed at participants from all ErUM communities and will be held at different locations in Germany. 

The annual program 2023 includes three deep learning schools, two deep learning train-the-trainer workshops and workshops on Big Data Analytics, Sustainability in ErUM-Data, Research Data Management and Next Generation Environment for Interoperable Data Analysis.

Registration and Announcement

Registration for the workshops and schools will be done through Indico Events. The links to the events will be announced here. We look forward to active participation from all ErUM communities. Feel free to distribute the event poster. 

Download the program

January 12, 2023

Join DAPHNE at Love Data Week in February

Photon and neutron (in particular) experiments performed at large-scale laboratory facilities are expensive to perform due to the high maintenance costs of said facilities. For this reason, making such data FAIR is highly desirable, as this will enable the maximum amount of knowledge to be extracted from it, even after the original experiment has long concluded. In this context, DAPHNE4NFDI aims to facilitate this transition towards FAIR data by developing infrastructure and workflows to aid in this data management issue.

During this event, three short presentations will be shown, which will describe the consortium and its goals, as well as two of the solutions that are in development within the framework of the project:
the first solution (presented by Dr. Philipp Jordt, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel) deals with Metadata schemes for photon and data as well as the automatic transfer of the metadata generated at photon beamlines at DESY (Germany) into SciCat (the metadata catalogue).
The second solution (presented by Dr. Nebojsa Zec, Helmholz Zentrum Hereon) deals with the tool "Made2Reflect", which is developed for the analysis of neutron and x-ray reflectivity profiles from molecular dynamics simulations.
This event will take place on February 15th at 2 pm (Berlin time - UTC +1).

Join.

December 5-7, 2022

DAPHNE work meeting at DESY

December 2, 2022

Blogpost No. 2: Deep Learning Pipeline for Surface Scattering Data

In this Blogpost, Linus Pithan and others from the Schreiber group at Univeristy of Tübingen present challenges and possible approaches for building a Grazing Incidence X-ray Diffraction (GIXD) data processing pipeline, putting an emphasis on machine learning applied to data analysis.

They demonstrate the implementation of such a software framework using gixi (Grazing Incidence X-ray diffraction Intelligent pipeline), which provides an end-to-end solution for automated GIXD analysis. This also includes image processing, detection of the diffraction peaks, peak intensity extraction, and crystal structure identification.

Applying the guidelines described in the DAPHNE proposal they provided interlinked example datasets, from raw- to analyzed data as well as the source code and parameters for all data processing steps involved in the data analysis chain, using Zenodo infrastructure.

More.

November 26, 2022

DAPHNE4NFDI@Women in Physics Conference in Karlsruhe

DAPHNE4NFDI and project TrackACT shared a booth at this year's Women in Physics Conference in Karlsruhe.

This was a great occasion to inform about our projects. We networked with a large number of attendees and consortia, such as PUNCH4NFDI.

More Information.

November 25, 2022

International DAPHNE XPCS Workshop

On Nov 25 DAPHNE organised an online workshop for the international X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) community with participants from Germany, France, Sweden and the USA.
XPCS users and beamline scientists from PETRA III, ESRF, European XFEL, APS, NSLS II and LCLS discussed the status quo of data management, analysis pipelines and needs for achieving FAIR XPCS data.

Data formats and metadata standards for data repositories have also been discussed.
The main outcome of this workshop was the common decision to build up a repositoriy for XPCS data.
First steps necessary to achieve this goal have been identified and a possible technical outline and realization will be presented in due time to the community.

October 27, 2022

DAPHNE ELN-Use Case presented at TrackAct

October 10, 2022

DAPHNE TA2 Workshop

Metadata and Repositories

September 29, 2022

Internal Workshop on ELNs and Metadata

From September 20 to 22nd, members of DAPHNE4NFDI Task Area 1, Managing Data Production, met in Frankfurt to discuss metadata fields, metadata schemata and electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) for instrument scientists.

This was an excellent opportunity to network amongst users and instrument scientists.

More.

September 23, 2022

DAPHNE@ADCR

At this year’s Annual Digital Catalysis & Catalysis-Related Sciences Conference, the ADCR, DAPHNE4NFDI had the chance to present itself by two posters.

The conference was organized by NFDI4Cat, and DAPHNE4NFDI members also participated in the lectures and World Café events, spanning from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), Ontologies and Taxonomies, Electronic laboratory notebooks to Open science – digital economy.

September 17, 2022

DAPHNE uses HIFIS

A large project like DAPHNE4NFDI needs a reliable infrastructure. Therefore, DAPHNE4NFDI relies on Helmholtz Federated IT Services (HIFIS).

Currently, DAPHNE4NFDI uses a Virtual Organization (VO) to organize access rights for services such as Sync & Share. Events are organized by the consortium using HIFIS Events and communication between project participants has been enabled via Mattermost.

More about HIFIS.

September 15, 2022

New Publication

Read the exciting story on how DAPHNE4INFDI data can be used for an End-to-End Deep Learning Pipeline for Real-Time Processing of Surface Scattering Data at Synchrotron Facilities.

September 7-9, 2022

DAPHNE4NFDI@SNI2022

Finally!

During the German Conference for Research with Synchrotron Radiation, Neutrons and Ion Beams at Large Facilities (SNI2022) that took place in Berlin, Germany from 5^th to 7^th September 2022 some DAPHNE4NFDI task areas leaders as well as PhDs, Postdocs and other participants of the project met in person (!) to talk about latest developments and ideas for the future. The three-day conference gave rise to great discussions - not only during the Micro Symposium on “Data & Digitalization” and the two poster sessions.

We are already looking forward to the next DAPHNE4NFDI in-person meetings – so stay tuned!

August 4-5, 2022

Shaping the Future of Neutron Experiments

From August 4-5, 2022, members of the DAPHNE Dissemination and Outreach team met at the Heinz Maier-Leibniz-Zentrum (MLZ) to discuss the future of digital neutron research.
The participants attended a number of meetings on Use Cases regarding metadata for instrument control, ELNs and metadata ingestion. A short summary of the meeting can be found here.
In short, it was a very productive meeting with lots of interesting topics. We hope to conduct similar meetings at other DAPHNE4NFDI facilities.

If you are interested in joining DAPHNE4NFDI, please send us an email at: contact ∂does-not-exist.daphne-nfdi de.

July 29, 2022

Workshop on SampleDB and SciCat

On June 29th, Moritz Hannemann, working for JCNS at MLZ, held a workshop on the comparison of SampleDB and SciCat. During his talk he gave some insights on the similarities and differences of both systems. In addition, he presented his results regarding the performance for ingestion and querying both databases. Both solutions are suitable for DAPHNE4NFDI. If you intend to use them, please take a look at Moritz’s list of specific features.

A compiled version of the workshop has been prepared as a report and can be found here.

July 1st, 2022

ErUM-Data-Hub: Deep Learning School I

In August 2022, ErUM-Data-Hub and DIG-UM will host the first Deep Learning School at Landhaus Nordhelle in Meinerzhagen. In a beautiful ambience, over 4 days of intensive lessons are held on the topics of Neural Network Building Blocks, Mastering Model Building, Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks and Introspection of Neural Networks. The workshop is aimed at beginners from all ErUM communities who have basic physical knowledge.

Registration

June 24, 2022

SNI2022: DAPHNE Microsymposia

DAPHNE4NFDI will be presented at two Microsymposia at SNI2022:

SNI2022 provides an excellent opportunity to exchange with DAPHNE scientists directly.

NEW: You can register for an Early Bird Fee until July 10, 2022. Posters can also be submitted until then.

May 30, 2022

Statement DAPHNE4NFDI Executive Board - Test and Evaluation of SciCat

The DAPHNE4NFDI Executive board recommends that the DAPHNE participants test and evaluate SciCat at their home labs in universities and at facilities - if possible.
They should provide feedback and indicate where further collective development is required - including deployment and integration.
To support SciCat-related activities, a SciCat round table will be organized by Linus Pithan (TA3) and a topic-specific mailing list was created by TA6.

(Subscription to mailing list: E-Mail to: sympa∂desy.de - Subject: subscribe daphne4nfdi-scicat ∂does-not-exist.desy de First Name Name)

May 23, 2022

SNI2022: Submission deadline for posters extended to July 10

Due to high demand, the deadline for submitting posters for the SNI2022 conference has been extended to July 10. Text abstracts should be no longer than 1500 characters and should not include graphics. Early bird registration is open until June 26.

SciCat Workshop for DAPHNE Users

More than 30 attendants participated in the SciCat Workshop on May 17. It was focusing on small scale installations for university users. SciCat is a metadata catalogue for scientists. In this workshop it was shown how it helps photon- and neutron research facilities to develop their own metadata strategy to follow FAIR principles.
Tobias Richter from European Spallation Source (ESS) gave an overview on SciCat, showing that it is flexible, customisable and extensible with a modern code base. It is actively developed and maintained. He also described which features SciCat provides and drew the line what SciCat doesn’t provide, so that users get a clear picture of what to expect.
Linus Pithan from university of Tübingen presented an extension to SciCat to create datasets through a web interface that easily allows to add metadata to SciCAT. He suggested to consider collaborative software development efforts within DAPHNE to contribute to SciCat.
Following his presentation, Use Cases for actual small-scale installation of SciCat were presented by Jonas Graetz (FAU, Erlangen) and Alexander Hinderhofer (Uni Tübingen).
The workshop closed with a discussion about the future of SciCAT especially in the context of DAPHNE, for example, how to avoid island solutions and to settle for a coherent strategy and use synergies between the involved actors.

 
More information on the workshop can be found at https://events.hifis.net/e/scicat4daphne.
SciCat website

Apply now for Deep Learning Train the Trainer Workshop!

Second Deep Learning Train-the-Trainer Workshop
09.06. und 10.06.2022 - Wuppertal.

Aim of this workshop is to educate lecturers for future teaching activities and to provide material to give lecture series on deep learning, including hands-on-exercises. This workshop is addressed to scientists from all ErUM communities with prior knowledge of neural networks with an academic level of postdoc or higher.
All attendees should be willing to give in the future deep learning lectures at schools and workshops.

DAPHNE4NFDI @ CDCS Opening Symposium 2022, DESY (Hamburg)

What a great opportunity: During the inaugural symposium of the Center for Data and Computing in Natural Sciences (CDCS) from 26^th to 28^th of April 2022 we were introducing the consortium to a broad scientific audience. The on-site event, themed “Data Science for Cross Disciplinary Research”, provided a platform for interesting topics like data storage, evolution of imaging and also machine learning and showed: a better research data infrastructure, user-driven solutions and long-term storage are not only needed in the future of photon- and neutron experiments!

March, 2022:

Online NFDI NeXus Workshop

More than 130 attendants informed themselves about NeXus on March 17-18 at the “Online NFDI NeXus Workshop“. NeXus is a common data format for neutron, x-ray, and muon science. It is constantly being developed as an international standard by scientists and programmers representing major scientific facilities to facilitate greater cooperation in the analysis and visualization of neutron, x-ray, and muon data.

On March 17^th, usage and recent developments around NeXus were presented by different research organisations and the industry. March 18^th was dedicated to getting to know each other better. Therefore, a session was held with short presentations. 18 presenters introduced their work in 2-3 slides. In four parallel sessions specific topics e.g., measurement technics and file formats were addressed. The workshop closed with a session introducing tools for creating and validating NeXus files.

Presentations from the workshop can be found here.