Completed CAKE Placements & Visits
Explore how CAKE Placements & Visits have supported the UK DRI community to attend conferences, visit collaborators, share their work and develop new connections.
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Placement & Visit Reports
Read reports from researchers who have completed their CAKE Placement or Visit, and find out what they did, where they went and what they gained from the experience.
Activity: Future of Open Research 2026 conference, Munich, 4th-6th May 2026
In May 2026, Alice Howarth and Ruth Davies attended the Future of Open Research conference 2026 hosted by the PHIL_OS project led by Prof. Sabina Leonelli at Technical University of Munich to present, network and foster collaboration.
As expectations of open research are increasingly embedded in UK research and the UK Reproducibility Network’s Open Research Programme (to develop institutional skill, capacity and reward for open research practices) draws to a close by 2027, this was the perfect opportunity to engage with colleagues from across the globe to navigate what’s next for UKRN and for the future of open research.
The conference was split across the themes of infrastructures, data sharing and management, participation and engagement, scholarly communication and metrics with a thread of equity and justice running throughout. As the conference continued, some common themes became clear, with a strong focus on building judicious connections, balancing intention and principle with practice, avoiding end user-isation and working towards process-oriented practice (rather than object-oriented). We had the opportunity to discuss with colleagues about the importance of open research as it sits within the wider research context and the risk of reproducing flawed assumptions, the consequence of particular business models and the concerns around value extraction and the artificial urgency presented by AI.
Key outcomes included: the opportunity to develop the now published Munich Manifesto for Equitable Open Research; presenting our poster about EIAs as a tool for change; and identifying opportunities for further collaboration with colleagues. All of which will be invaluable to the next steps of the EDI work within UKRN.
Activity: Durham HPC Days, June 15-17 2026
In June 2026, representatives of the Cloud-Native SIG, Piper Fowler-Wright and Lewis Sampson, delivered a hands-on tutorial on Kubernetes at Durham HPC Days 2026. The tutorial, developed with support from CAKE, saw participants constructing their own lightweight Kubernetes (K3S) clusters using Raspberry Pi Hardware, and then learning cluster management, interaction and deployments through hands-on exercises. The session was well received, with great engagement and suggestions from those attending which the pair will take to future iterations of the tutorial. All lesson material from the tutorial is available on GitHub and those interested in finding more about the Cloud-Native SIG may do so at cloudnative-sig.ac.uk, or by joining our JISC Mailing List.
We thank CAKE for supporting our travel to Durham to deliver the tutorial.
Activity: The 40-th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications 2026, April 8 - 10, 2026
Dear colleagues,
Since childhood, I have dreamed of visiting New Zealand and exploring distant countries and continents. This year, I had the opportunity to be part of the 40th International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2026), hosted by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The conference was held in a hybrid format, and I participated remotely via Zoom. I presented my paper, “Sleptsov Net Virtual Machine Implementation on GPU,” during the AINA-S26 session. The presentation was followed by a productive discussion, with particular interest in the proposed novel approach for efficiently selecting fireable transitions within a net extended with priority arcs. I would like to sincerely thank the CAKE team for supporting my research. I look forward to seeing you all at future conference venues.
Best wishes,
Tatiana R. Shmeleva.
Placement & Visit Blog Posts
Catch up on the latest news, stories and updates from our Placement & Visit community.
