---
id: organizations/dafni-asu-cici-and-sparc
about:
  depiction: organizations/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
organization:
  form: 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 stands for the Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure.[^1] It serves UK research on transport, water, energy and city-scale systems, and was funded as an £8 million investment by the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC).[^2] Researchers deposit and share data on it, run and link computational models at a larger scale than their own machines allow, and present results as visualisations.[^2] Hosted projects include:

- OpenCLIM, a climate impacts modelling framework for UK risk assessment[^1]
- Pywr-WREW, a water resources model for England and Wales[^1]
- a sewer-overflow flood risk model[^1]
- projects on grid resilience, aviation resilience and flood-disrupted road networks[^1,3]

Access is arranged with DAFNI directly.[^3]

Wenwen Li directs two groups at Arizona State University: the Spatial Analysis Research Center (SPARC) and the Cyberinfrastructure and Computational Intelligence (CICI) Lab.[^4] She is a professor in ASU's School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.[^4] Her research applies cyberinfrastructure (shared computing, storage and networks for research), big data and geospatial AI to environmental and social science.[^4] Her projects include an AI flood-mapping tool, wildfire prediction in Alaska, AI for disaster and emergency response, and tracking Arctic permafrost thaw.[^4] Funders include NSF, NASA, USGS and Google.org.[^4]