The WatITis conference is held as a hybrid event on December 4, 2024. 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 - 11:15)
Transport Layer Security at UW: 2024
Speaker: Mike Patterson
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
A general overview of where SSL/TLS has been at UW since 2009, where it is now, and future directions.
Multi-authoritative data collection and aggretation of IT asset data
Speaker: Ryan Goggin
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Taking inspiration from Identity and Access Management (IDM) systems, SOC has written tooling to collect, correlate and merge data into common data models from various IT asset source such as SentinelOne, Qualys, IPAM, VMWare, etc to create a comprehensive set of data about assets. Ryan will go through the design of the system, how to collect data, map to common data models, and merging multiple authoritative and non-authoritative sources in a pluggable manner that allows for system owners to maintain data collection and mapping.
CEL AI Assistant in JIRA - The Intersection of AI Privacy & Governance
Speaker: Michael Li
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
This is a continuation of the previous WatITis Presentation: CELBot: GPT powered chatbot - Support for Instructors and Students.
From a business perspective, developing a chatbot using an AI model to support instructors and students whenever needed ensures they receive timely assistance faster and easier. This approach allows the team to remain productive and proactive in addressing other important areas. A team can also step in whenever the chatbot cannot provide the necessary solutions. However, developing an AI system like a chatbot is a complex task that demands a comprehensive framework. This framework is crucial in navigating the evolving landscape of AI technologies and tools. Since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022, many tools have emerged, guiding developers and researchers and sparking excitement for meaningful applications. A robust framework ensures a systematic approach to system development, increasing productivity and instilling confidence in the project's direction. Unfortunately, as AI models advance, so do the associated concerns and challenges. Ethical use, legal implications (such as using private data and for the model to generate hallucinated information), and compliance are becoming increasingly complex, prompting legal and privacy professionals to navigate a chaotic list of considerations. Successfully developing an AI system requires the collaboration of a diverse team, including stakeholders such as developers, compliance officers, project managers, and often legal experts. This multidisciplinary approach ensures that all aspects of the system—from technical functionality to regulatory adherence—are thoroughly addressed. This is the blend between AI Privacy and Governance. During the presentation, a demo will be provided with how the research is being applied to the product.
VR for Workplace Wellbeing: A Collaborative Initiative in Campusv
Speaker: Lynn Long
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Research has repeatedly demonstrated that spending time in nature can positively impact our personal wellbeing. While we don’t always have easy access to natural spaces, recent research is demonstrating that encountering nature using immersive VR can have similar positive effects, facilitating recovery of depleted emotional capacity and even boosting creativity. In a 2022 study, workers in a high stress work environment who took a short nature break using the Nature Treks VR app, reported significantly increased feelings of happiness and relaxation, as well as significantly decreased feelings of sadness, anger, and anxiety. The experience was also associated with a significant reduction in heart rate. The Conflict Management Office (CMO), with support from the Staff Enhancement Fund (SEF), is bringing these benefits to Waterloo staff with the VR for Workplace Wellness initiative. This initiative has placed three Meta Quest 2 head-mounted displays (HMDs) in each of the Dana Porter and Davis Centre libraries. The headsets have been preloaded with the Nature Treks VR app and are available for all University of Waterloo staff (part-time, full-time, casual, and student staff) to sign out for one-hour intervals at the circulation desk. Nature Treks VR allows you to explore a wide variety of natural settings including tropical beaches, green fields, underwater oceans, and outer space. Within these spaces you can interact with more than 60 different animals and change the weather and time of day. In this session, research supporting VR as a wellness initiative will be shared along with feedback received to date. All six VR headsets will be present so that those who wish to try the Nature Treks app, can, as time allows. The session will end with a time to discuss as a group how these headsets might be used to further benefit staff in the future.
Session 2 (11:15 - 12:00)
Show and tell on hand held assistive tech availble in the library2-1
Speaker: Tim Ireland, Michael R. Clark, Israel Cefrin da Silva, David Vanderhorst
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
The library is a fantastic storehouse of accessibility devices. This demonstration will introduce and show off many of the devices available to students registered with Library accessibility services. You will gain hands-on familiarity and remove some of the mystery surrounding different kinds of supports available on campus.
Before & After: The Accessibility Transformation
Speakers: Amanda Vos, Elizabeth Rogers
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
A session dedicated to going over real-life examples of digital accessibility transformations at the University of Waterloo. The talk will cover various accessibility problems on multiple platforms and the technical know-how to remediate them. There will be time for Q+A and discussion at the end.
OFAS Innovating Faculty Application Processes
Speakers: Bill Baer, Herbert Balagtas, Jason Greatrex, Amy Carr, Spencer Chen
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
The Online Faculty Application System (OFAS) is a dynamic and evolving project designed with users in mind. It simplifies the application process with a direct workflow that reflects the user. Allowing applicants, referees, committees and admin to use one system. By employing scrum methodologies, the ACO team continuously assesses and adjusts goals to ensure the system remains responsive and effective. This iterative process fosters innovation and responsiveness, allowing OFAS to incorporate user feedback seamlessly. As a result, OFAS continues to grow to become the one stop shop of the application process.
Using Vagrant for building virtual environment
Speaker: Aleksandar Malinovic
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Nowadays, it is desirable to have more than one testing (QA) environment for testing different application's features. At the same time, making QA environment can be expensive and not always achievable. Therefore, developers use various virtualization approaches to make cheap and reliable QA environments. There are many tools on the market helping us to achieve this goal and one of them is Vagrant. In this presentation, we will show how Vagrant can be used for building various kinds of virtual environments. In addition to, it will be presented the benefits and limitations of this technology and how Vagrant is used in the Odyssey project for building development (DEV) and QA environment.
A Journey In Microsoft 365 Automation
Speaker: Paul Dietrich
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
The general purpose of this talk is to highlight the timeline from which IST began the journey of automation the creation of Microsoft 365 resources such as Microsoft Teams. Utilizing the Microsoft dotnet ecosystem and C# language, we have created many tools - both admin and user centric - that greatly increased our efficiency in creating and managing these resources.
Session 3 (14:00 - 14:25)
Fostering Educational Innovation: IT’s Role in Transforming Teaching at UW
Speakers: Kyle Scholz, Pam Fluttert
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
Partnerships between Academic Support Units are a critical part of what makes the University of Waterloo function efficiently. One such partnership that has recently emerged is that between IT and the Teaching Innovation Incubator. The Teaching Innovation Incubator is intended to serve as the launch pad for bold and unconventional ideas that will shape the next generation of teaching and learning at Waterloo. Many projects that would fit this description inherently involve the use of new and emerging technologies, through which IT has, and will likely continue to be, a major partner in this work. These partnerships can take on different forms. Often they are project-based partnerships. Projects such as the Accessible Education project, envisioning strategies to make teaching fully accessible for disabled learners, or the project investigating new LEARN tools like Creator+ and Performance+, necessarily require IT insight and involvement as their scope intersects with IT’s mandate and areas of responsibility. At times these partnerships extend beyond project-based work and result in new physical units on campus. One such example of this is the EdTech Sandbox, a new space on campus borne out of a Training Equipment and Renewal Fund grant awarded to UW in 2023. The EdTech Sandbox provides space and tools to experiment with EdTech, and is accessible by staff, instructors, and students alike. It includes both a virtual place to experiment with online technologies and tools, and a physical space for collaboration and experimentation with different teaching and learning technologies within a flexible active-learning classroom-type environment where instructors and students can put technology-enabled teaching approaches into practice. This session will provide further insight and clarity into the Teaching Innovation Incubator, showcasing some of its projects and initiatives that require partnership with IT units, and raise awareness of long-term opportunities to continue fostering these critical partnerships between support units on campus.
J'ai besoin d'aide: How to ask for IT help as an IT employee
Speaker: Mike Patterson
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
We've all seen requests where you're left thinking "Help me to help you!" Sometimes we've seen them in our own requests. We are expected to sort of figure out on our own how to make meaningful requests for assistance. Hopefully this is a light-hearted look at a serious subject.
Greener Solutions: ACO's Journey in Sustainable Resource Management
Speakers: Bill Baer, Jason Greatrex, Jameson Schildroth, Spencer Chen, Amy Carr
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
Join the Arts Computing Office (ACO) team as we showcase our innovative approaches to solutions and sustainability. Learn how ACO has repurposed existing resources for clients, providing crucial lab upgrades with Lenovo docks and 24" Dell monitors. Discover how ACO's partnerships with vendors ensure environmental responsibility and maximize value. This presentation highlights ACO's commitment to fostering a sustainable future through strategic resource management and community collaboration. Walk away with practical insights on how to implement similar sustainable practices in your own organization.
Comparisons and benchmarks of a GPU-powered fluid dynamics research code on MFCF high-performance computing servers
Speaker: Derek Steinmoeller
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
Writing high-performance computing (HPC) code that is accelerated by 'General Purpose Graphical Processing Unit' (GPGPU) programming strategies can be a long and technically challenging process. The GPGPU programming 'barrier-to-entry' is further burdened by the uncertainties associated with actually achieving the desired performance gains vs. the time investment required to port traditional computing code to an accelerator architecture. In this talk, one such example of a fluid dynamics research code that employs GPU libraries is explored to help unravel some of the mysteries associated with investing time in GPU code development and the associated performance trade-offs. We compare and contrast its 'CPU-only' mode against its GPU-accelerated mode on both consumer-level and state-of-the-art nVIDIA GPU devices that are offered for research purposes within the Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF).
Managing an army of co-ops on complex tech. projects
Speaker: Charlotte Armstrong
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
The WCMS 3 migration project took three years to complete and it wouldn't have been possible without the 50+ co-ops that helped out! Here's what we learned managing teams of co-ops on this complex and challenging project.
Looker Studio - A More User-Friendly Approach to Google Analytics 4 Data
Speaker: Jenny Hirst
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
The Library reluctantly migrated to the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) only to be met with a completely different user interface, which not only displays data differently, but has made changes to how the data can be retrieved and analyzed. As the library's digital presence continues to grow and expand, so does the requests for respective web analytics, but the training required for users to navigate GA4 is more cumbersome than previously experienced. And so we have turned to Google's Looker Studio (formally Data Studio) to create comprehensive, easy-to-use reports for our end users, which we would like to demonstrate for campus.
Kuali and the WCMS - How to build successful collaboration
Speakers: Joe Kwan, Danielle Jeanneault
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Kuali is the new Academic Calendar for the University of Waterloo. Learn how the Registrar's Office and the Web Development team in IST were able to successfully integrate a critical new system into the WCMS.
Submission Sanity: Handling Conference Call for Proposals
Speakers: Ryan Goggin
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
Keeping track of Call for Proposals can be tricky... maintaining updates and ranking submissions adds to the challenge. Ryan will be discussing how WatITis has handled Call for Proposals previously and showing off the in-house FAST project for collecting, ranking, and managing submissions for conferences that WatITis has been using since 2021 and some of the plans for future development.
Click, Block, Share: Building an Autonomous Cyber Defence with SOAR & MISP
Speakers: Jordan Barnartt
Duration: 20 Minutes
Description:
Explore how our Security Operations Centre (SOC) is developing an advanced, automated pipeline that detects, blocks, and shares security threats—all within minutes. By combining tools like Suricata for intrusion detection, Elasticsearch for data indexing, Cortex XSOAR for automated response, and MISP for intelligence sharing, our SOC can identify malicious activity and act fast to neutralize it. Learn how this pipeline enables us to seamlessly safeguard our network and share critical threat indicators with other institutions, helping to strengthen collective defences across the cybersecurity community.
Session 4 (15:10 - 15:55)
Unicode - The World of Multilingual Computing (and Emojis 😍)
Speaker: James French
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Unicode is one of those invisible technologies (like TCP/IP) that everyone uses but few know about or fully understand. If you've ever used an emoji or sent a message to your friend or relative in China, you've used Unicode. This talk will outline the history of multilingual computing and talk about the rise of Unicode and how it has become the standard that enables the entire world to use computing devices in their language of choice. It will also look under the hood and examine exactly what Unicode is and how it works. Finally, some tips and advice will be given for those who might need to develop software using Unicode.
Implementing a Modern, E-Commerce Capable Registration System at WatSPEED
Speaker: Andrew Paling
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Earlier this year WatSPEED passed a significant milestone - 1000 days since we were formed. During those 1000 days WatSPEED has grown and evolved immensely. A large part of the evolution is related to the implementation of a modern, e-commerce capable registration and person management system. We needed a system to go far above and beyond the functionality of our previous homegrown system to align with the current needs and future goals of WatSPEED. In this presentation, I will cover these topics:
1.What is WatSPEED?
2.How we arrived at the need for a new system.
3.The decision to implement LifeLong Learning Extended Education (formerly Destiny One), powered by Modern Campus.
4.Implementation Overview.
5.Implementation Roadblocks.
6.Implementation Successes.
7.Implementation Takeaways.
8.A brief overview of the key features and benefits of our new system.
Through these topics, I hope to provide 2 key benefits to attendees. First, inform attendees about WatSPEED and what our system allows us to offer. More importantly, share hard-earned lessons from our implementation to help others plan their future enterprise software implementations.
Getting fancy with WCMS forms
Speaker: Kevin Paxman
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Web forms are more powerful than you ever imagined. Join us to uncover the magic of forms that can create custom searches, chat with Teams, perform calculations, fetch remote data, and send info to MailChimp. And that’s just the beginning!
Leveraging Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for Campus Operations
Speaker: Clifford Graves, Thomas Ramos
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Plant Operations has historically used PDF versions of floor plans to track assets. This has become an overbearing process. We are exploring how to store and maintain the assets and information documented on thousands of these PDFs in a Geographical Information System (GIS). Esri’s GIS software has been used for decades across campus for academic purposes. The licensing was extended to allow for administrative/campus operation use via Esri Canada. Since then, Plant Operations with collaboration from the Faculty of Environment has been researching and utilizing GIS software. During the presentation we will discuss and demonstrate how we have been able to utilize GIS software to create the interactive Campus Map, create a building/floor plan model that can replace PDFs, and mirror Space Planning Department’s Archibus campus, building, floor and room tables. Our approach has been a collaborative effort to not create another siloed system, but to leverage existing source of truth systems and processes.
Adventures in equity data
Speaker: Shona Forrest
Duration: 45 Minutes
Description:
Together with the Indigenous Relations (IR) and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-racism (EDI-R) offices, IAP is analyzing our socio-demographic data to improve positive outcomes for racialized, marginalized, and excluded groups on campus. The “Equity Data as a Strategic Resource” project will be used as the case study, and the session will share how a set of confidential data was collected, stored and analyzed, discuss barriers and challenges. The session will offer lessons learned about developing data infrastructure and data management practices for a strategic data set.
After the Workshop, participants will:
1) understand how the university’s equity data is collected, analyzed and reported
2) understand the "equity data as a strategic resource" project goals
3) understand how Waterloo's socio-demographic data can be used to answer some of the university’s strategic questions.