A talk about Research IT in UCL

James Hetherington

2026-06-04

Engineering

Protesting sub-postmasters outside the Royal Court of Justice Image credit: Photo by PA Media, purchased for this lecture.

Engineering

The tools, practices and systems that enable repeatable, reliable, safe and scalable technical construction.

Illustration of an earthquake damaging only some buildings.

Science and Engineering

Diagram showing the relationship between science and engineering

A Definition

Engineering Computational Science is the development and application of tools, practices and systems for the efficient, trustworthy, ethical and safe use of information technologies as part of trying to produce knowledge about the world.

Epistemic Cultures

A cartoon illustrating different cultures of knowledge production, from humanities to astronomy. Image credit: Generated with the DALL·E image model, OpenAI, accessed via ChatGPT (April 2026).

Service provision as an academic practice

UCL ARC's hybrid academic-service model
  • Utility
  • Curiosity
  • Community

Has it worked?

  • Grown from ~50 to ~150, mostly from external funding
  • NCR Charger
  • CCMI CDT
  • FRIDGE TRE work mentioned in UK AI for Science strategy
  • Constant back and forth over identity
  • Resource contention between services and grants is hard
  • Service transfer with IT is still bumpy (but improving)

What does this mean for the festival?

When you review the talks and posters, you might enjoy thinking of them from this perspective.

  • What do the innovations presented imply about how we all enable and support digital research community?
  • What do tools, platforms and techniques presented suggest about ideas for research and innovation?
  • How do both impact on questions of reproducibility, reliability and trust in digital scholarship?