Schedule

Everyone talks about building capacity for research, but how do you actually do it? In this presentation we'll share the story of the Scholarly Innovation Lab (SIL) as a "small startup" framework for digital research services, support and community.  The SIL is our answer to meeting the needs of the newer entrants to research computing — the arts, humanities, social and information sciences — with modest resources and a vision for a bigger future. We'll share lessons learned from our—

After building a robust technology stack that includes a data lake and uses AWS to capture learning data from Canvas and campus partners, our university is now developing a custom platform for academic advisors to access and visualize student information. This project supports our ability to promote student success by identifying at-risk students earlier than has ever been possible. This presentation outlines our technical architecture, campus partnerships, and ongoing efforts to apply Canvas Data and other learning—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

We are undergoing a campus-wide initiative to develop new digital learning experience delivery modes and business model. We seek to deploy offerings across multiple platforms to allow for a portfolio of online offerings, from Free to Freemium to Paid. This ecosystem approach is desirable in order to facilitate multiple architectures best suited for particular programs and offerings.

To achieve this goal, we have—

About a year ago, our campus stood up a high performance computing (HPC) cluster by networking together several different department’s research data centers. This consolidated compute nodes and storage into a single, much larger cluster which could then be utilized by any lab. We followed a co-operative model where a department could donate hardware to this cluster, and their jobs will be “niced” at level proportionate to their contribution value. Researchers could also access the cluster for—

According to a recent survey conducted by a leading security firm, 76% of respondents experienced phishing attacks.  The threat from phishing attacks is real and causes data breaches, financial loss, and system compromises like ransomware.  This presentation will cover real-life phishing attacks observed at UC and the various motives of the phishers.  Attendees will see first-hand the methods used by attackers to lure potential victims into clicking links or responding with information that ultimately benefits the attackers. —

For the Adobe Fellows program, faculty from a range of departments who teach courses in American Cultures—a universal undergraduate requirement with an emphasis on the ethnic diversity of sociopolitical and historical narratives within the United States—develop assignments in which students create projects using the Adobe CC suite of programs, including videos, podcasts, infographics, and Spark webpage presentations.

The Adobe Fellows program was conceived to:

• Enrich student learning by promoting innovative methods for engaging with and representing local—

Do you approach change by hitting your users over the head with the same communications strategy or do you hit the nail on the head with targeted communication and outreach efforts? Let’s face it change is painful and inconvenient, especially when you’re competing with the distractions of a busy community. Beginning spring 2018 IT Security rolled out a set of initiatives to improve data, network, and system protection. We knew from experience that internal change was often—

Faculty are increasingly using Canvas to enhance their face-to-face classes and this has led to a growing interest in online and hybrid courses, which is only further encouraged by our university’s Digital Learning Initiative. However, our department doesn’t have the resources to work directly with every interested faculty member. We needed to find a scalable solution that would allow for interested faculty to develop quality online and hybrid courses and digital course components without having to work—

In this session, you will learn how mobile app design can be strategically leveraged in innovative ways to make data collection easier and to increase participant engagement. This information includes insights on user-centered approaches for applying design thinking methodology and includes a discussion of design best practices. Case studies of research apps for special populations will be demonstrated.

SeedMeLab is a set of modular building blocks to create powerful data management and data sharing websites. It enables research teams to manage, share, search, visualize, and present their data in a web-based environment using an access-controlled, branded, and customizable website they own and control. It supports storing and viewing data in a familiar tree hierarchy, but also supports formatted annotations, lightweight visualizations, and threaded comments on any file/folder. SeedMeLab can be easily extended and customized to support metadata, job parameters, and—

There is currently a lack of a shared definition among campus academic and administrative departments that provide teaching and learning services of what it means to be a ‘student’ at our UC campus.  Departments regularly adopt data feeds for directory and other campus services as the definition of a student; this leads to some students getting denied critical student services. The Student Definition initiative aims to create a standardized framework for campus, so that each department can—

Creating and delivering videos for the online masses is a daunting task. It often requires copious amounts of time, well-designed spaces, and expensive tools to implement and streamline their use in growing flipped classroom landscape. However, those who embrace flipped learning need to think like architects, not high-budget video producers. While it’s tempting to become enamored by the technology or space we wish we had, now more than ever, it has become clear that creating effective instructional—

There is no recording for this session. The presenters have opted to provide the slides for attendees. These can be downloaded below in the Session Files section - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

The battle to make research computing more accessible and secure, while extremely engaging, remains complex. This talk will focus on some of the cutting edge containerized research computing implementations that UCSF has designed, attempted to expand, and used at the Center for Digital Health Innovation—

This session will reveal the journey that the UCLA Web Services Team is going through in transitioning from a traditional web development shop to a data first web services organization in support of research and researchers. Areas of focus will include transitioning from traditional infrastructure to cloud infrastructure as-a-service, APIs for data sharing, and creating new knowledge through collaboration.

Because research IT has become a commodity, we need to look for other avenues for adding value. One way of doing this—

Over the past decade an increasing number of students with hearing impairments have been identified on our campus who need real-time captioning of their classes. There are too few captioning providers in our local area to meet that need. We developed a system which provides captioning staff at remote locations an audio feed from the media system of any of our classrooms and allows them to share the text that they type with students in those rooms—

How can user experience (UX)  techniques be applied to instructional technology services? We’ll describe a case study where we researched and analyzed the experience of instructors teaching large classes (i.e. those that impact the greatest number of students) to build a Journey Map, which in turn helped us identify opportunities to improve our suite of digital learning services. 

In early 2018, our campus rolled out a AWS environment for research computing with PHI, limited to a certain number of use cases, the idea being that if a researcher has a use case matching an approved one, they will have a much more streamlined option to start working on AWS, while still meeting all the security and compliance requirements. We also limited this to a few research projects at first so that we could refine the—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

We'll share our experience with a top-right quadrant SIEM, including benefits, pitfalls, operation and support.

• How to learn to use the SIEM
• Best use of vendor resources
• What we expected & what we got
• Leveraging for a small team
• Metrics vs Measurements/Actionable Numbers
• Runbook-style procedures
• Extending to the cloud
• Useful dashboards/reports
• What we would do differently

Research facilitation is serious business. Such support is critical to the research and research-coupled academic enterprise. Annual sponsored research in the UC System has grown to over $6 billion dollars (2016-17), yet national sponsors are requiring more external collaboration and are scrutinizing the IT infrastructure that supports research projects. All of this requires complex IT solutions and technology expertise - it is no longer possible for the researcher to act independently, except for the very largest of—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

The Student Activity Hub (SAH) combines information about all graduate and undergraduate students into a single repository. Academic analysts, advisors, and faculty can access the curated data through supported reporting and visualization tools: Tableau and Cognos. 

In the initial phase, the SAH is designed to make institutional and operational reporting easier by providing access to 15 years’ worth of student data—

When UCLA HumTech converted a homegrown application to a serverless app, we had to rethink how we approached data security. While UCLA has a number of solutions to protect student data, most of these solutions assume that there's a server to run on. A serverless app requires rethinking how we accessed Shibboleth, queried the student record system, and protected resources.

This talk will present our experience securing a serverless application. It is for developers, system administrators, and—

This workshop will demonstrate how to use free open-source tools to set up a safe environment to explore a deliberately insecure web application to train yourself or other web-application developers on web-application security.

How do you effectively support a network of over 1,500 concurrent courses, whose online pages are collectively accessed over 2 million times each week? In supporting a customized, self-hosted learning management system, data and data visualizations are a foundational element of our decision-making. Take a look inside our tool kit and find out how we use different resources to help us monitor the pulse of our learning management system. Google Analytics, Splunk, Tableau, and other custom reporting and data visualization tools—

Do you or your team enter into agreements for IT services, software, hardware or professional services? Does your Unit use Cloud solutions to solve your business problems?  If the answer is yes to any of those questions, then this panel session is for you.

Earlier in this year, a systemwide workgroup rebuilt Appendix DS in order to make it simpler and easier to use, and to be Supplier friendly.

In this session, our panel will discuss when—

I will go over how our team started incorporating accessibility, how we addressed the issues we faced, and where we're at/heading. The focus is more on the practicality of implementing accessibility standards, since there's a lot of information about why to be accessible and what it means to be accessible, but not always how to make sure that you're implementing standards correctly.

Time/interest permitting, I can also go over WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 specifics and go a—

Data Science and Computer Science courses with large enrollments face grading challenges due to the size and nature of their assignments. In our university’s Introductory Data Science class, every student submission is broken up into auto-graded code sections and manually graded response sections to be separately graded, then merged to produce a final grade. In response, our university’s Department of Data Science has developed a grading solution pipeline to productionize this process, in addition to auto-grading software and—

At the request of the presenter, the session recording will not be posted. Please reach out to the presenter with any questions. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Several teams at our campus are building a research data platform, called Information Commons. Along with software tools and data models this forms an infrastructure serving the campus research community with many different types of de-identified clinical data. Currently available/planned data are electronic health records, images, clinical notes, omics and—

Classroom Response Systems (CRS, aka “Clickers”) have been, for many years, used in courses across UC campuses for engagement and assessment purposes, to the degree that some instructors consider them indispensable. With advances in CRS technology that provide new features, as well as enable students to participate using their own devices (phones, tablets, laptops), many UC campuses have been investigating a variety of new systems; some campuses have formally adopted a new system, while others are at—

ArcGIS is a powerful suite of spatial tools that scales to private enterprises, small cities, and likewise, universities. Structuring enterprise tools in a highly federated environment, such as a university, presents unique challenges, but when done correctly enables researchers to utilize an adaptable research toolkit and collaborate effectively without the overhead of administrative resource constraints. In this session, GIS and IT Professionals from multiple campuses, as well as from the GIS software company, Esri Education Team, will—

At the request of the presenter, this session was not recorded. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Artificial intelligence-supported business processes are changing how we do business, how we manage risk, how we communicate, and how we organize. We have started down the path of building the foundation to enable our organization to benefit from these innovations. In our talk, we will cover:  
- how the data and data warehouse of the future is changing  
- how we—

Attendees will be able to see how they can leverage their existing systems to create opportunities for learning and development outside of the classroom that's accessible for staff, students, and anyone with the appropriate credentials (as needed). Specifically this session will cover how to start a social learning site, and a Transferable Skills Library using Drupal 8, a word analyzation tool, e-learning videos, and job descriptions. Additionally we'll review how to measure the impact of these efforts—

Information security of research data is often an afterthought, until there is a data emergency.  We, in our department, have collaborated with data governance, security, CTSI, and privacy, to establish a procedural and technical plan to help ensure the security of our data delivery.  We have focused on 3 methods to improve our IS: quick disclosure, recurring data requests, and Service Now practices to tighten up our security methods.  In this session I will review these methods—

Concealing database credentials and rotating passwords is usually an exhaustive activity - for system administrators, database administrators, application developers, and security auditors.  Discover how your organization can save time by using AWS Secrets Manager.

See how the AJS developers at UCOP created an AWS CloudFormation template to add a secret to the AWS Secrets Manager to both encrypt the credentials as well as rotating the password as often as required.  Watch and learn how we modified our Java—

There is only audio for this presentation so, with permission from the presenter, we have provided the slide deck and any supplemental materials in the Session Files section below. - UCTech 2019 Planning Committee

Recently we have launched a new initiative in our institution called “Research Enablement” . This initiative has paved the way for IT to understand the research community’s technology needs, so that we can provide them with secure and sophisticated IT solutions to conduct—

Do you or your team members feel like IS-3 is too complex? Don’t know where to start? Does it seem hard to figure out the first step? Do you hesitate to develop a plan? Do you wish other options were allowed? These questions can limit compliance and hinder implementation – ultimately leading to increased cyber risk.

In this session, we will discuss these questions and pain points in the implementation process and help learn how to overcome—

Researchers generate lots of data, and want to store all of it.  As a Research IT group supporting labs and groups with over 1,250 TiB of primary storage, we've built storage solutions of all sizes.  In this session, we'll go over our current solutions for groups with storage needs in the following categories: less than 2 TiB, 2 TiB-200 TiB, and 300+ TiB.  We'll talk about systems built on both flash and magnetic drives, and discuss backup,—

Funding bodies, campus initiatives, and professional associations have recently placed an increasing importance on training as a way to help researchers, librarians and IT staff better engage with the expanding array of tools, research techniques, and vast amounts of data.  The objective of many of these training programs is to improve the skills of researchers, librarians and IT staff in working with data. But how do we do this effectively in a way that promotes inclusivity? The—

Like many universities, in 2017 UC <redacted>'s Internet border was largely open. The end-of-life intrusion prevention system (IPS), our only protection beyond a few router access control lists, was removed when it failed. There was very little to distinguish our campus network from the Internet. We had limited ability to implement east-west controls between campus departments, mostly through router ACLs and distributed firewalls.

This presentation will trace the path that we took from this beginning to functional—

Title

Securing International Student & Scholar Success

Summary

The team at UC-Irvine has created different applications for UCI International Center. These applications have not only created a user-friendly experience for international students and eased their transitions into UCI but also made the International center processes related to SEVIS compliance paperless, efficient and cost effective. In addition, UCI has gone a step beyond and successfully implemented multiple measures such as 2-factor authentication and transparent encryption to better—

Many research support groups across the UC system are not engaging with (or may be completely unaware of) the many regional and national organizations that exist to support research IT professionals. As such, they are missing the chance to connect with peers, learn about how others are addressing challenges, and what good practices are emerging. This leads to time and resources lost to reinventing wheels, and ultimately to less effective support of research on our campuses. Organizations in—

When we look at our data through a geographic lens, we see that location can unveil patterns that we otherwise might not have discovered. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a core enabling technology that allows for users to access, interpret and visualize multivariate data in unique ways. It supports exciting cross disciplinary research and providing unique learning outcomes for researchers and students, enabling them to “think spatial”.  

In this session, GIS Librarians and IT Professionals from—

As the University of California, San Francisco prepares for a containerized future across many different platforms, environments, and teams, the School of Medicine Technology Services team (SOMTech) has begun experimenting with cross-platform containerization solutions. In this experimental architecture, deployment, and development effort, the School of Medicine has built and tested a multi-tenant Kubernetes solution on top of its existing Amazon Research Cloud implementation (ARC + Elastic Kubernetes Service) previously described in the 2018 talk Accelerating Secure Medical—

Standard ED5A of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards for accreditation of a medical school states that:

ED5A. A medical education program must include instructional opportunities for active learning and independent study to foster the skills necessary for lifelong learning.

At our medical school, we have incorporated instructional technology tools into the learning environment to enhance learner engagement and collaboration and to promote active learning. In this session we will:

•    Provide participants with an—

Instructional media is ubiquitous in higher education. Whether it is lecture-captures, just-in-time instruction, fully produced videos, or quickly recorded feedback, we are all creating a significant amount of media! In this presentation, you'll hear the story of one campus' approach to supporting media capture and providing media management solutions. We started with a set of requirements, organized research into trends (and forward looking vision), asked for vendor demos, evaluated solutions, and made a selection. The final solution,—

Many research computing services are seeing rapid growth in the use of virtual machine (VM) and container images to support research computation, applications, and workflows (Belmann et al., 2015). These images are used across a range of compute models and disciplines. Researcher interest in VMs and containers is driven by a wide range of considerations, including need to provision and run VM images when using cloud resources; portability of environments to multiple computational resources or platforms; efficiency in—