Sessions 2023

The WatITis conference is held as a hybrid event on December 6, 2023.  The in-person sessions will be held in the Science Teaching Complex (STC).

* indicates a 20 minute session

(R) indicates session will be recorded

Session 1 (10:30 - 11:20)

Speaker: Mike Patterson

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
I plan to talk about a real information security breach or two, and a made up scenario that happens in real life every day. I will also say what I can about The Event That Forced Password Resets Upon Everybody And Their Dogs And Cats Too.

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Speaker: Samantha St. Amand, Isaac Morland

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:

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Speaker: Marian Davies

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
The breadth of information is overwhelming. How do you identify information you can trust? Do you know the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The need to engage with information, to be comfortable with it, and to share it is becoming a challenging experience. Content is an issue, word choice is an issue, and yet we need to come together and through our communications navigate our space to encourage understanding and acceptance. Academic librarians understand the dilemmas surrounding our everyday happenings with respect to finding relevant information and we are sensitive to the level of need. We know how to discern and parse out various values of information, how to identify and sort through the multiple ambiguities. This is what we do. And we do it with grace, with clarity, and with charity by being sensitive to the individual searching for answers. There is no doubt about it, we need librarians more than ever!

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Speaker: Catherine Newell Kelly, Dorothy Chapman, Gina Hickman, and Melissa Ireland

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
EDI student data is important to the University in many ways. This information supports equitable admissions processes and informs our programs to address systemic gaps and support the success of racialized and marginalized students.

In Fall 2022, the Ontario Universities Application Centre (OUAC) began to collect EDI data for Fall 2023 applicants on behalf of Ontario universities. Waterloo has undertaken a project to capture student equity data and enable students to enter and update some of their socio demographic data. For example, as of June 2023, students may opt to enter their pronouns.

At this session you will learn how the project team determined the data to be captured, created a solution to enable students to maintain their data in Quest, and implemented governance processes to ensure the data is shared—and not shared--appropriately, keeping in mind privacy requirements.

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Speaker: Pratik Patel

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
WUSA has transitioned to utilizing Microsoft Intune over the past 2 years. I aim to share our experiences in deploying various applications (including Win32 apps, printers, and software) and effectively managing both shared devices, which are used by multiple staff members, and dedicated devices assigned to individual staff.

I hope to do a quick demo with different devices.

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Session 2 (11:30 - 12:20)

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Speaker: Pam Fluttert, Scott Anderson

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:

An extensive review of LEARN was initiated last summer in response to the pending contract end date of October 31, 2023. The review analyzed satisfaction, the market,  trends in teaching and learning, and future expectations of Waterloo’s LMS. 

A central LMS like LEARN has campus-wide impacts, with usage for academic undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as events such as staff training/development, workshops, community groups, and professional development (internal and external learners). 

Learn more about the process that was followed to arrive at an informed decision to renew the contract for another 5 years, the feedback received from staff, faculty, and students, and the next steps to ensure the University has an LMS that meets our future directions and goals

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Speaker: Nathan Lee, Iva Badjari

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
What is digital accessibility and how does it relate to the University’s values? What is the current state of our ‘digital accessibility healthiness’ on campus? What can you do to support digital accessibility?

Under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) Information and Communications Standard, the University of Waterloo has a legal obligation to make its digital content on the web and social media accessible. The AODA refers to an international set of online accessibility standards called the Web Consortium Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The University is currently required to meet WCAG 2.0, level AA standards. 

The University of Waterloo’s primary web hosting system is the Waterloo Content Management System (WCMS) and consists of over 1,100 websites. There are other websites hosted outside of the WCMS, either within or external to the “uwaterloo.ca” domain which have been set up by various University faculties, departments or groups.

All websites operated by a University of Waterloo group must meet legislated accessibility requirements.

In this presentation Iva Badjari, Associate Director, Digital Communications (Marketing and Strategic Initiatives) and Nathan Lee, Project Manager (Information Systems and Technology) will talk about compliance as an ongoing practice, the current efforts to update digital content at the university to meet WCAG standards and ideas to embed digital accessibility into our values and the ‘way we do things’ into the future.

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Speaker: Jordan Barnartt

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Many IT staff around campus will be familiar with the Security Operation Centre's new Vulnerability Management program. This process uses a combination of the Qualys IT Security platform and other sources to report on and ensure the remediation of IT security vulnerabilities across the University. This new method of communicating to IT admins about vulnerabilities began in September 2022, and the process has since been iterated upon, improved, and expanded. Love it or hate it, it has so far succeeded in identifying and remediating thousands of vulnerabilities around campus and generating awareness and discourse for this process.

This talk will discuss the philosophy and history behind the vulnerability management program at UW, as well as its successes, failures, tribulations, and future.

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Speaker: Eric Bremner, Joe Kwan

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Taking advantage of UWs generous tuition benefit program, this session will tell the story of how a staff member and their manager collaborated strategically to leverage this benefit positively for both. You will learn how the staff member was able to present program options to their manager, how they worked together to identify the chosen program to benefit both the staff member as well as the team, how the manager supported the staff member through the subsequent two years, and how the staff member was almost immediately able to apply learning to their role in a positive way.

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Speaker: Anthony Brennan

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
This talk will consist of a brief overview of the tools and techniques used by CSCF's Infrastructure Group over the last 2 years to increase performance of the CephFS cluster by 10-100x(!). Special attention will be given to the breadth and depth of technical proficiency required to solve the wide variety of problems that were encountered. We will conclude with a frank discussion of staffing costs and the total cost of ownership of the CephFS cluster compared to more "expensive" turn-key solutions for providing NFS homedirectory service for a general-use Linux environment. Specific challenges to be discussed...

Measuring performance and characterizing workload
- Analysis (Ftrace) and instrumentation (eBPF) of Linux kernel modules/internals
- Modifying cephfs kernel module (C)

Monitoring
- Building a high performance aggregation and logging endpoint for handling
high cardinality telemetry data (systems software development, C++)

Performance analysis
- Applied Queueing theory
- Statistical analysis and Site Relibility Engineering

Distributed Systems Modelling and Analysis
- Finding undocumented scalability limits through direct analysis of Ceph
source code (C++)
- Mitigating bottlenecks by making targeted alterations to deployment of
specific components

Iterative Performance Optimization
- Sampling profiling (perf)
- More art than science, the value of wisdom/intuition

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Session 3 (1:20 - 2:10)

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Speaker: Mirko Vucicevich

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
User Experience is a core principle to keep in mind when developing applications -- however the user's experience does not begin and end with the applications we build.

In this talk I'll give a brief introduction of UX, some simple principles to keep in mind, and how we can apply those principles to non-development aspects of the university such as documentation and forms.

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Speaker: Jason Greatrex

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Learn how the ACO in partnership with WPrint and the Sustainability Office are applying industry standard project management practices to deliver continuous service and technology improvements through the new Faculty of Arts computer rollover pilot program. This new initiative is managing technology changes by meeting client computer needs and addressing institutional fiscal demands through cost sharing, waste reduction, campus partner collaboration, and promoting sustainable development through the circular economy.

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Speaker: Sara Anderson

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
In March 2023, the University of Waterloo released our institutional Research Data Management Strategy and Implementation Plan. This strategy addresses the need for a distinctions-based approach to Indigenous research data, in line with Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles, which have implications for research data management at our institution and beyond. In this short presentation, we will focus on the unique needs and concerns of Indigenous community collaborators when it comes to research data, and how the principles of Indigenous Data Sovereignty impact data storage and data management protocols and practices at the University of Waterloo.

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Speaker: Beto Lucena, Yasin Dahi, Mike Li

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Instructors and course authors at the University of Waterloo have a myriad of technologies, services, and systems that they will interface with when designing or delivering a course. The information and documentation for these systems are distributed across various platforms. In some cases, the documentation found on one site may differ from information found on another site, be missing relevant information, or contain outdated information. Lastly, when an instructor has a question, they might submit a request and wait for a response, perhaps requiring numerous steps and interpretations before ever getting a solution or answer. The CEL Systems Support team has created this chatbot in-house to help instructors and students clarify questions related to online learning at the University. The aim of this initiative is to provide a one-stop shop to instructors and students who are searching for information related to online learning, online course development or support on educational technologies. We continue to refine the Bot in the background to ensure accuracy and integrity of the information provided as search results. The Bot is still in beta and is in the process of learning from the disparate resources distributed across many departments in the university.

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Speaker: Charlotte Armstrong

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Drupal, the open-source technology used by the University of Waterloo (along with many other higher education institutions), released version 8 in 2015. The nature of this update meant that the WCMS would require a complete rewrite, and all sites to be migrated. The WCMS team at IST immediately started planning for this change and announced the WCMS 3 project in 2018, but full understanding of the scope of this change could not happen until sites started to migrate in 2021. Since then, the WCMS team, consisting of both the Web Development team along with the Training & Support team proceeded to build a product, discover and resolve migration issues, create training materials, and manage an increase in support all while implementing this campus wide change that affects thousands of users and campus communities.

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Speaker: Riyin Wan

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
This presentation is to provide security awareness training to our students and employees. The intention is to educate our end users on how to perform daily work securely. It will cover some common cyber security topics and industry best practices.

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Speaker: Edward Chrzanowski

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
The Cython language makes writing C extensions for the Python language as easy as Python itself. Cython is a source code translator based on Pyrex, but supports more cutting edge functionality and optimizations.
The Cython language is a superset of the Python language (almost all Python code is also valid Cython code), but Cython additionally supports optional static typing to natively call C functions, operate with C++ classes and declare fast C types on variables and class attributes. This allows the compiler to generate very efficient C code from Cython code.
This makes Cython the ideal language for writing glue code for external C/C++ libraries, and for fast C modules that speed up the execution of Python code.

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Speaker: Ishan Abeywardena, Harsh Grover, Terry Bae

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
CEL Systems at the Centre for Extended Learning builds and supports many largescale enterprise systems driving the online course development and delivery at University of Waterloo. Further, we develop and support enterprise systems, under MoA, for ASU such as WatSPEED, Quality Assurance Office, Teaching Assessment Process and Office of Advancement, to name a few. Among these, there are a number of legacy systems which have been in development for over a decade and have reached end-of-life due to obsolescence of the technology stack, database and/or architecture. Given that these are mission critical systems, they needed to be moved or redeveloped on a modern technology stack to ensure minimal disruption to business processes. The complexity of these systems, the lack of technical documentation, the evolution of requirements and the short windows before end-of-life have made the redevelopment of some of these systems using conventional software development methodologies infeasible. As such, CEL Systems adopted a rapid workflow development model through a no-code architecture using Decisions, UW’s central business process management platform. In this session, we want to share our journey in migrating largescale enterprise legacy systems onto Decisions, the major issues we faced and the hard choices we had to make in terms of architecture, how we addressed version control, CI/CD and SQA, and the best practices we would recommend for success with Decisions.

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Speaker: Sarah Cooper

Duration: 20 Minutes

Description:
Learning how to create dynamic and accessible web content! This presentation will mostly focus on creating WCMS web pages, however, many of the accessibility rules apply to all types of online writing.

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Session 4 (2:20 - 3:05)

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Speaker: Mike Gaspic

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Provide a review of the Decisions business process management platform. It's current and intended uses, examples of production processes, benefits/challenges. Short demo of an existing process.

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Speaker: Angus Rogerson

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
"Hi, it's Mike. Its kind of important." That's how it started. 2700 credit cards later, what have we learned. In this mildly technical talk I will review the timeline of the incident and response, lessons learned and how we have applied those lessons ... so far.

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Speaker: Alison Hitchens, Ian Milligan

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Common observations (and frustrations!) about University of Waterloo are decentralization and silos but recent projects on campus recognize the value of bringing folks together to move us forward. This panel will discuss how 3 initiatives are working together, IT Review – Research Computing theme, the Research Computing Committee, and the Institutional Research Data Management Strategy Implementation Working Group to address the challenges of research computing support.

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Speaker: Terry Labach

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
The phrase “living off the land” is likely to make you think of rugged survivalists, foraging in the backwoods, eating unusual plants and animals, and sleeping under primitive shelters.

For computer system administrators, though, there is a more sinister meaning - living off the land (LOTL) cyberattacks.

Many attacks on computer systems make use of malware, custom software created and deployed by cybercriminals. Malware is used to infiltrate and take control of computer systems, but it can be detected as something foreign to the attacked computer. LOTL attacks use software normally present on a computer system to enable the intrusion. Using software that has a legitimate purpose on the computer for malicious purposes makes detection more difficult.

Terry Labach, from IST’s Information Security Services team, will provide an overview of typical LOTL attacks. He will discuss the tools used by attackers on Windows and macOS systems. Finally, he will describe techniques that system administrators and security staff can use to prevent and detect LOTL attacks.

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Speaker: Barbara Daly

Duration: 45 Minutes

Description:
Sharing how I use FileMaker for tracking grades and more each term. Benefits of security, versatility, communication etc. Could also share other tools within the application in general.
AND how FM databases are better than spreadsheets in general!

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