Event Details

  • Dates: 24–25 March 2025
  • Location: School of Public Health, White City campus, Imperial College London

The odin-monty workshop took place on 24–25 March 2025 at Imperial College London’s White City campus.

The two-day Odin-Monty Workshop brought together 75 participants from across academia, public health agencies, and international institutions to build capacity and community around the odin, dust, and monty packages. The programme included hands-on sessions, invited case studies, a drop-in technical clinic, and a lightning talk session open to online attendees—where 23 joined virtually, including one speaker from Brazil.

Travel grants were offered to support a more diverse and inclusive group of attendees. Participants represented at least 11 countries and over 18 institutions including universities (Imperial, LSHTM, Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, Galway, Charité, Umeå), public health bodies (UKHSA, WHO, RIVM), and international research centres (Pasteur, EBI, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre). This diversity significantly enriched the discussions and perspectives shared.

To support continued learning, a public online book was launched detailing the use of odin-monty for modelling and inference:

📖 Online odin-monty book

Workshop Aims

  • Introducing the updated odin-monty toolkit
  • Building a community and fostering collaboration
  • Collecting feedback to guide further refinement

By actively involving attendees, the odin-monty team aims to ensure these tools evolve in step with community needs and emerging trends.

Lightning Talks

On 24 March 2025 (15:30–16:30 UK time), we will host an online/hybrid session, “Lightning talks – odin applications in practice.” You can register for this session if you are unable to travel to London or if you are primarily interested in the talks.

Slide decks

In the interactive sessions, we will work through two slide decks:

Slide decks from talks will be added to the agenda for future reference.

Installation instructions

We strongly recommend version 4.4.x of R; older versions may work (and in particular 4.3.x is known to work).

For the interactive session, you will need recent versions of odin2, monty and dust2, which you can install from our R-universe:

install.packages(
  c("monty", "dust2", "odin2"),
  repos = c("https://mrc-ide.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

You will also need a working C++ toolchain; you can test if you have one by running

pkgbuild::has_build_tools(debug = TRUE)
#> Trying to compile a simple C file
#> Running /opt/R/4.5.0/lib/R/bin/R CMD SHLIB foo.c
#> using C compiler: ‘gcc (Ubuntu 13.3.0-6ubuntu2~24.04) 13.3.0’
#> gcc -std=gnu2x -I"/opt/R/4.5.0/lib/R/include" -DNDEBUG   -I/usr/local/include    -fpic  -g -O2  -c foo.c -o foo.o
#> gcc -std=gnu2x -shared -L/opt/R/4.5.0/lib/R/lib -L/usr/local/lib -o foo.so foo.o -L/opt/R/4.5.0/lib/R/lib -lR
#> 
#> [1] TRUE

If this fails, you should follow instructions for your platform:

  • Windows: Install “RTools”, for 4.4.x of R see these instructions
  • macOS: Install the XCode command line tools following these instructions
  • Linux: This varies by distribution, and most users will likely have everything they need if they can install any packages.

Resources

All files can be found on the resources page. Slides are linked above and from the agenda

Registration Deadline

Registration is closed at the moment