Parallel Sessions Abstracts 6-10 Monday, 2:45-3:45

pdf version

Session 6: “The elephant who is usually not in the room: research computing"

Location: MDCL 1105

How does your institution provide research computing support? As university budgets and research dollars get tighter, is there a role for a campus support service, or does the future belong to graduate student labour and Amazon EC2? Bring your ideas, experience, wish lists, and predictions to this session.

Panel participants:

Session 7:Implementing Drupal - Four Perspectives

Location: MDCL 1102

Drupal has achieved considerable acceptance as a Web publishing solution by a number of Canadian Universities. This panel will present the Drupal experience of the Universities of Waterloo, Brock, McGill and Windsor. Weaving around the common technical issues and the typical “roll-out” challenges, each institution nevertheless has unique experiences and lessons to share. Topics covered include; how did you do this in Drupal, and how did you roll out Drupal at your university. Training and support for the University community, the implementation plan and a variety of other issues will be discussed. A question period will follow the presentations from each panel member. This panel will be of interest to any institution who is using Drupal or considering a change in their Web publishing environment.

Panel members will include::

Session 8: Physiology of Information

Location: MDCL 1305/1307

At the core of information technology is the creation, manipulation, and transmission of information in coded (i.e. binary)format. We live in a world defined by the digital. But what if the future of information is not digital but biochemical? As we learn more about neurophysiology we are beginning to understand the physical basis of information. How is information encoded or represented in our brains? What are the physiological components and processes that constitute memory and learning? If we understand the physiology of information, could we then synthesize it? This presentation will explore the new information frontier of biochemistry and speculate on what might evolve if we can harness these new opportunities. Audience members will require a willing suspension of disbelief and a healthy curiosity. Not for the faint of heart

Session 9: A walk along identity manager way

Location MDCL 1110

Embarking on a journey to implement an identity management system isn't easy, especially when the vendor you choose gets purchased by another company and they decide to discontinue your chosen product along the way. The University of Guelph was a long time customer of Sun and in 2008 decided to implement Sun Identity Manager to solve some of our identity management needs. Custom provisioning code, LDAP to AD sync programs, and password management headaches would all be a thing of the past. After spending money on training and developing an implementation plan, Oracle purchased Sun and decided to discontinue Sun's product. Facing an uncertain future, previous plans were made more generic and a person repository was implemented to bridge the gap until a new product, Oracle Identity Manager, was chosen. Join us as we share our story of challenges, opportunities, successes, and the lessons we learned along the way.

Web Access Management and SSO: Transitioning from Sun to Oracle

The University of Guelph is transitioning from the Sun Access Manager(a.k.a openSSO)to the Oracle Access Manager(OAM). This presentation discusses the entire process from deployment planning through to the resolution of practical challenges, e.g., software licensing, implementation etc. The key characteristics of our OAM environment include high availability and virtualization. Aspects covered in this talk, which may help other institutions planning a similar transition, include service monitoring, customization of the authentication interface, and comparison of the Oracle Access Manager to its former Sun counterpart. Over the past two years of production deployment of the Sun Access Manager, the University of Guelph has brought Single Sign On to some of its key services. As an example, the custom middleware facilitating SSO with the campus Learning Management System hosted in the cloud (Desire2Learn) is analyzed in this talk to illustrate various SSO integration alternatives and their challenges.

Session 10: Live Video Streaming: myths, challenges and how the cloud can help

Location: MDCL 1309

From the Canada West University Athletic Association to Atlantic University Sports, many varsity sports leagues have at least experimented with live video streaming of their games. In fact, some leagues have gone as far as making video streaming and archiving mandatory for tournaments and even regular season games. If not already, there will come a day when your athletics department asks for support from your IT staff to accomplish these tasks. This presentation will look at what is involved with offering this service, what resources are required and discuss whether it can be down in-house or if outsourcing is the only way. If outsourcing is the better option for your university, what should you demand from the service provider and what should they expect from you. This March, the University of New Brunswick Saint John will be hosting the 2011 CCAA Women's Volleyball National Championship. I am managing the video streaming and archiving operation. This presentation will rely heavily on this experience to provide a recent (and presumably successful) example with a detailed description of the operation.

Deploying the Opencast Matterhorn Lecture Capture Solution

This presentation outlines our experiences in deploying lecture capture at the University of Saskatchewan, focusing on our most recent efforts to use the open source Matterhorn product. Used by more than 2,500 students in over 30 courses annually, the presenters will outline issues in contributing to the development of the project, to integrating the project with enterprise systems, and supporting such a system across the campus.