---
id: engines/dafni-asu-cici-and-sparc
about:
  depiction: engines/dafni-asu-cici-and-sparc.jpg
  label: DAFNI / ASU CICI and SPARC
  description: >-
    DAFNI is a UK computing platform for national-infrastructure research; SPARC
    and the CICI Lab at Arizona State University, led by Wenwen Li, do GeoAI and
    cyberinfrastructure research for environmental and disaster applications.
  tags:
    - research
    - GeoAI
    - UK
tool:
  form: Research infrastructure and methods
  group: Research infrastructure
  homepage: 'https://www.dafni.ac.uk/'
open:
  source: unknown
  data: partly
  api: unknown
  participation: partly
domains:
  - places
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Home - DAFNI
      url: 'https://www.dafni.ac.uk/'
    - title: Who We Are - DAFNI
      url: 'https://www.dafni.ac.uk/who-we-are/'
    - title: Projects - DAFNI
      url: 'https://www.dafni.ac.uk/projects/'
    - title: WenWen Li | ASU Search
      url: 'https://search.asu.edu/profile/1978357'
    - title: 'Goodchild et al.: Digital twins in urban informatics, 2024'
      url: 'https://doi.org/10.1007/s44212-024-00048-6'
  reviewed: '2026-10-18'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
DAFNI, the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure, is a computing platform for research on transport, water, energy and city-scale systems in the UK, funded as an £8 million investment by the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). Researchers deposit and share data, run and link computational models at larger scale than on their own machines, and present results through visualisation. Projects hosted on it include OpenCLIM (a climate impacts modelling framework for UK risk assessment), Pywr-WREW (a water resources model for England and Wales), a sewer-overflow flood risk model, and projects on grid resilience, aviation resilience and flood-disrupted road networks. Access is arranged with DAFNI directly.

SPARC, the Spatial Analysis Research Center at Arizona State University, and the CICI (Cyberinfrastructure and Computational Intelligence) Lab are both directed by Wenwen Li, a professor in ASU's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Her research covers cyberinfrastructure, big data and geospatial AI applied to environmental and social science; the profile lists an AI flood-mapping tool, wildfire prediction in Alaska, AI for disaster and emergency response, and tracking Arctic permafrost thaw, with funding from NSF, NASA, USGS and Google.org among others.