Morning Breakout Sessions: #2

The following presentations were selected for the Morning Breakout Sessions #2

Single Sign On and Authentication at U of T
(Cancelled)

Single Sign On and Authentication SESSION has been CANCELLED - All attendees that registered already will receive an email for alternate arrangements. Sorry for the inconvenience.

FOCUS: UTL Service for Faculty Profiles
(Gabriela Mircea/Prof. Jim Colliander/Rea Devakos)

This presentation will explore Focus, a new service offered by the University of Toronto Libraries. Focus is a very rich customizable faculty profile tool that displays bibliographies, photos and research statements, and mines the data to reveal collaborations and to find experts in research areas. Focus also facilitates author self archiving by checking copyright status and automating deposit into T-Space, the university s research repository.

Through a variety of tools such as: tag clouds, RSS feeds, dynamic timeline views, interest and departmental groupings, book covers display, automatic co-author recognition, Focus links the UofT research community. Focus has university wide relevance and in its short life it quickly grabbed the attention of several departments. We will show how the service tends to the community needs by showcasing the research output and offering greater access to publications.

We will also look at the advantages presented by the underlying technologies. Focus is powered by an open source application based on Ruby on Rails, Java, Lucene, Solr, and MySQL. Focus is flexible allowing for a customized look and feel and for building features specific to the UofT community. We are now in the process of implementing utorID authentication. With this presentation we want to bring this exciting new service offering to the UofT community attention.

http://bibapptest.library.utoronto.ca/

Lecture Capture: Good Student Learning or Good Bedtime Story? An Interdisciplinary Assessment of the Use of Podcasts in Higher-Education
(Lena Paulo Kushnir/Kenneth Berry)

Nowadays podcasts are used in many university courses and often viewed as an effective way to augment undergraduate education. We present research on the use of podcasts in six courses across four disciplines (Art, Dentistry, Design and Psychology). We surveyed 324 students on their opinions, perceptions, and use of podcasts. We found that instructors and students had preconceived notions about the (i) efficacy of podcasts on student learning and (ii) impact on class attendance. Each of the presenters in this session will debate these issues; taking opposite positions, each will support their claims with empirical data collected across the six courses. Variables that explain how podcasts influence learning outcomes are considered and theories that contribute to our understanding of instructor and student misconceptions around the use of podcasts are discussed.

TranXENding Desktops: Supporting Windows Desktops in an Ever-changing IT Landscape
(Greg Mount/Joe Lim)

UTM and the Faculty of Dentistry is embarking on a quest to find the nirvana of supporting Windows desktops in an ever-changing IT landscape. We both have a desire to deliver Windows desktop as an on-demand services to our users anywhere. We will speak to how we will each develop and implement this on our respective areas.

UTM: JavaWeb Applications - In House Web, Desktop and PDA Solution for Business Needs
(Jenny Hu/David Yin/Nia McCash)

Come to us with a problem. We will give you a solution!

UTM Web Technology Services has developed a variety of in-house J2EE web, desktop, and PDA applications over the past years that solve the business needs of our users. Join us for an hour of technical session packed with our design decisions, demo, and Q&A.

We will go over the technology stack that builds the foundation of our enterprise Java web applications. Technologies include Struts2, Hibernate, Spring Security, Sitemesh, XMPP protocol and Smack library. We will also share the performance issues we have encountered and how we overcome the problem with Hibernate performance tuning.

A brief introduction to the applications:

- Missed a test due to illness? No more paper submission for special consideration. Students go online to submit their request which will be reviewed by the department administrator.

- Taking Shuttle Bus from UTM to St. George? With a swipe of your T-Card, our PDA software can tell the bus driver if you are eligible for a free ride or not.

- When the unexpected happened, what s the best way to inform staff/faculty/students on campus? Our Campus Emergency Desktop Alert system can send a message to users desktops in a crisis scenario.

- Do you have resources or rooms that you would like users to book? With our newly developed Resource Booking Application, departments can set up a booking space and provide booking service online to university users.

Solving the Source Code Sharing problem between divisions at U of T using Git (a distributed version control system)
(Michael O'Cleirigh)

Open source development is similar in topology to the U of T Divisional
structure. Lots of different actors participate from different perspectives
and with different funding models to accomplish similar goals.

The various actors at U of T are a smaller subset of the problem and can benefit from
the tools and strategies that have been developed at scale.

This talk will briefly describe git and distributed version control in
general, but the focus will be on how it can be used to solve the problem of
sharing code between the different U of T divisions.

Sharing code between divisions is an important way to boost productivity by
allowing existing solutions to problems to be reused allowing more time to be
spent on specialization.

It will discuss issues raised over the last few years about:
1. Code Snippet sharing
2. Infrastructure/Building block code sharing
3. Source code licensing (a free within U of T clause)
4. Use for research projects (continuity as students finish and move on)
5. Use for student course projects (with Professor managed access controls)

Additional Background:

Git was developed initially by Linus Torvalds the creator of the Linux kernel
in 2005 and it is now rapidly gaining market share because of the flexibility
it provides. The kernel in one year has > 5000 different updates by > 1000
different contributors and git provides the tools to facilitate this level of
interaction.

Several projects and companies offer a social coding
eco system comprised of web interface, wiki, issue tracker and means to see who
is utilizing the code you shared.

Distributed version control lets developers look to a central place for the
code; but then allows them to copy it for exclusive internal use.

SciNet Updates: User Perspective and System Perspective
(Daniel Gruner)

SciNet: Two Years Later. Daniel Gruner will go over updates on SciNet from the user perspective and overview what is available and HPC support. Further, Daniel will discuss the updates from the systems perspective, exploring the management of a huge system, filesystems and petabytes of storage.