UIS Engagement Events 2018-2019

University Information Services (UIS) is hosting an IT forum afternoon. The event will cover brief updates on UIS projects and services. Industry briefing sessions from Amazon Web Services (including merchandise giveaways) and Phoenix and a representative from Dell. There will also be shared projects from the IT community (Physics and the Healthcare Improvement Studies Insitute) .

• A presentation and Q&A session to discuss the development of Falcon-on-Drupal – a new version of the Falcon website content management system (CMS) service based on the Drupal platform – and the migration of sites to the new service.
• Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions about the development, service features and how the migration may affect their sites.

• The Faculty of Law has recently adopted the University’s new room booking system, Booker, and would like to invite you to a briefing session to learn more about the system.

• Booker is a free, user friendly, quick and robust cloud-based service that provides an effective means of managing rooms within any Department and also promotes the sharing of available room space. It’s part of the Education Space project being run by Professor Graham Virgo to improve the space utilisation within the University and to provide a uniform approach to the booking of rooms, both within departments and across University sites.

• The Faculty of Law is hosting a briefing session during which the Booker team will provide a short demonstration of the system and its capabilities and you’ll be able to put questions both to the team and to current users of the system like myself. Refreshments will be provided.

Our Buildings, Universities and Cities are becoming more digital. After the autonomous car we'll inevitably have the autonomous campus and city. IoT and building-computer interfacing and integration is already a part of many Computer Officers' responsibilities, which will continue to grow. This University has hundreds of people actively engaged in related research, from Chemistry, Land Economy, most Divisions of Engineering, The Institute of Public Health, The Judge Business School, Geography and Computer Science. We'll review the work going on, including the radio network and sensor arrays already in use around Cambridge, as well as the direction technology is taking us, and consider how across the university the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.

Presented by Dr Ian Lewis, Director of Infrastructure Investment and Dr Qiuchen Lu, Research Associate at the Centre for Digital Built Britain (Engineering Department).

Handling the large volume of spam, ransomware and other malware delivered via email to often indignant users has become quite a large part of standard IT duties over the past few years. Along with the increasing complexity of the tricks and techniques used by hacker groups for spearphishing and delivering malware, it is clearly apparent that there is only so much that professional IT staff can expect from their users in terms of determining what is, and is not, malware or phishing.

Yet the pressure on often relatively junior administrative and financial staff has not decreased and the time taken to try and work out what is genuine and what is not does not make for smooth time management. Most important of all, IT practitioners must not indulge in the blame culture when an incident happens, simply because the person blamed will probably never "own up" to making a possible mistake again. A positive culture - even admitting "Yes, it has happened to me" - is essential to encourage users to be open about mistakes.

This seminar will attempt to show some of the more common of the latest spammer tricks, and introduce some tools which (hopefully) will make your life easier.

Our mentoring scheme needs you! We facilitate this supportive initiative exclusively for the IT community and UIS staff. Since the launch in 2017, we have adapted the scheme to improve its effectiveness as the number of participants has grown. We'll provide guidance workshops and reference materials to help support you, so you can gain the most out of being a mentor or mentee.

This briefing session will give you an idea on what you can expect to get out of the scheme, you'll hear from others already involved and understand what it means to be a mentor or mentee.

Our mentoring scheme needs you! We facilitate this supportive initiative exclusively for the IT community and UIS staff. Since the launch in 2017, we have adapted the scheme to improve its effectiveness as the number of participants has grown. We'll provide guidance workshops and reference materials to help support you, so you can gain the most out of being a mentor or mentee.

This briefing session will give you an idea on what you can expect to get out of the scheme, you'll hear from others already involved and understand what it means to be a mentor or mentee.

University Information Services (UIS) and the TechLink coordinators are hosting a second IT forum event. The afternoon event will cover UIS updates from the Infrastructure and DevOps Divisions and a representative from Dell.

Using the Parallel Computing capabilities in MATLAB allows you to take advantage of additional hardware resources that may be available either locally on your desktop or on clusters and clouds. By using more hardware, you can reduce the cycle time for your workflow and solve computationally- and data-intensive problems faster.

In this seminar, we will discuss a range of workflows available to scale MATLAB applications with minimal changes to your MATLAB code and without needing to learn any shell or scheduler programming syntax.

UIS staff will share what worked well and what could have been done better or differently to deliver work within the programme. Topics will range from system testing to user engagement.

The Research Computing Services division has recently launched a new service which provides infrastructure as a service (IaaS) capability. The service provides instant high-performance compute, storage, network resources and other functionality. It helps to avoid the expense and complexity of buying and managing your own physical servers and other data centre infrastructure. It enables IT practitioners and research groups to build their own scalable platforms that fit their exact needs and requirements. More information can be found here https://www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/research-computing-cloud-services

The research Computing Services team will present Research Computing Cloud service capabilities and details about the platform that the service is built on. There also will be a live demo of the platform and a Q&A session.

• A presentation and Q&A session to discuss the development of Falcon-on-Drupal – a new version of the Falcon website content management system (CMS) service based on the Drupal platform – and the migration of sites to the new service.
• Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions about the development, service features and how the migration may affect their sites.

An informative and social event to celebrate the launch of a new University Developer Hub.

University Information Services with support from developers across the University have been working on customising a University Developer Hub. The Hub is hosted using a GitLab application, with the aim to provide a useful collaboration resource for developers and code users.

There will be short presentations from the alpha testers who will share their experience and involvement in testing the hub. You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions about the service and meet with like-minded professionals involved with developing and coding.

To celebrate the launch of the University Developer Hub, all attendees are welcome to stay for drinks and light refreshments served after the presentation.

The Business Information Team within Academic and Financial Planning and Analysis (AFPA) - formerly Planning Resource Allocation Office makes data for reporting and analysis for different parts of the University. They are currently using a Tableau Server for publishing and sharing their reports and data sources, to enable their data users to access the information, interact with the data, and create their own analysis in a safe environment.

In this presentation, the Business Information Team will show you how the Tableau Server operates and some of the work they are doing. They will present the structure of their Tableau site, the active directory groups, and the people and projects that are live and using Tableau across the University Administrative Services.

The Tableau Server core license is available to all members of the University. AFPA has implemented the administrative site, while UIS are developing a strategy to implement the Teaching and Research sites.

An informative and social event to celebrate the launch of a new University Developer Hub.

University Information Services with support from developers across the University has been working on customising a University Developer Hub. The Hub is hosted using a GitLab application, with the aim to provide a valuable collaboration resource for developers and code users.

There will be short presentations from the alpha testers who will share their experience and involvement in testing the Hub. You’ll have the opportunity to ask informal questions about the service and meet with like-minded professionals involved with developing.

To celebrate the launch of the University Developer Hub, all attendees are welcome to stay for drinks and light refreshments served after the presentation.

• University Information Services (UIS) is facilitating a mentoring scheme across UIS and the IT Community, providing career development support for individuals and organisations. This workshop is intended for mentors who have enrolled in the scheme. The session will cover advice and helpful methods on how to be a confident and effective mentor and a chance to share ideas with other mentors enrolled in the scheme.

• The Faculty of Education has recently adopted the University’s new room booking system Booker, and would like to invite you to a briefing session to learn more about the system.

• Booker is a free, user-friendly, quick and robust cloud-based service that provides an effective means of managing rooms within any Department and also promotes the sharing of available room space. It’s part of the Education Space project being run by Professor Graham Virgo to improve the space utilisation within the University and to provide a uniform approach to the booking of rooms, both within departments and across University sites.

• The Faculty of Education is hosting a briefing session during which the Booker team will provide a short demonstration of the system and its capabilities and you’ll be able to put questions both to the team and to current users of the system.

• Refreshments will be provided at 10:00. The presentation will begin at 10:30.

• 14:15-14:25: Introduction to IT Portfolios. Mark Rowland will give a brief overview of what the Portfolios are and who in the University is responsible for each element.

• 14:25-14:55: The UIS Accessibility Working Group will update on work going on to ensure that we provide accessible services. They will highlight plans for institutions that will need to adapt to review the accessibility of their own websites and services and to write accessibility statements. There'll be a demo of screen reading technology working with inaccessible materials, and the difference that a few relatively simple updates can make to improve the experience for all.

• 14:55-15:05: Rich Wareham from UIS DevOps will share what UIS's technology staff hope to achieve by starting a new Community of Practice following a recent unconference event.

• 15:05-15:15: Break

• 15:15-15:50: Phoenix Software (our Microsoft Office365 partners) will update on some of the shared Office 365 experience across the University, including how some institutions are using Mimecast, such as for GDPR compliance. - POSTPONED

• 15:50-16:00: The recent Oxford IT Forum Conference was another excellent combination of talks and workshops, and vendor interaction. Brief highlights of the day will be provided by Ronald Haynes, along with ideas about further expanding our collaborative IT efforts with Oxford.

• 16:00-16:30: Celebratory refreshments -This will be the final seminar of this academic year, and as usual, there will be some light refreshments to celebrate the end-of-term!

This is an opportunity for Cambridge’s teaching staff to see guest speaker, Dale Munday from Lancaster University, showcase how Lancaster University are using MS Teams in higher education.

NOTE: UIS is currently undertaking a review of all the digital collaboration services it provides with a view to rationalising the number of solutions it supports in future. Microsoft Teams is one of the solutions included in the scope of the review. The review is still in progress, and no decisions about which solutions UIS will support in future have yet been reached. This external speaker event is being hosted by UIS independently of the review, and is solely intended to share information about what other HE establishments are doing in the digital education space.

MS Teams is a digital hub that brings conversations, content, and apps together in one 21st Century teaching and learning space. Educators can create collaborative classrooms, connect in professional learning communities, and communicate from a single experience in Office 365 for Education allowing them to create rich, persistent conversation makes learning more visible and accessible to the entire class.

Teachers can engage students in project-based learning with text, video, and voice using integrations. Harnessing student social interactions allow educators to enhance the learning and provide an engaging space to assess and feedback. The opportunity to empower students while helping them develop the skills they'll need to be successful in the future will be demonstrated throughout the session. Approaching assessment & feedback as an ongoing dialogue presented in multi-modal and digital form can support opportunities for learning that are creative, critical, and mirror our increasingly digitally-mediated society.

Delegates will be guided through Microsoft Teams and the process of utilizing a range of digital tools to create an engaging, inclusive and pedagogically underpinned curriculum/classroom. The session will focus on active learning approaches, harnessing the opportunities afforded through digital technologies, where inclusion and collaboration will be at the forefront. Amplifying the synergy between Microsoft Teams and the associated Class OneNote will demonstrate the power of individualised student portfolios and the variety of teaching approaches that can be enhanced through this delivery resource. Building on recent research, which explored the impact of drawing on to-be-learned information, highlighted enhanced memory and found it to be a reliable, replicable means of boosting performance. Teams & Class OneNote allow teachers and students to use digitally handwritten notes, drawings and graphic organisers to enhance the learning experience.