Conference Archives

Speakers

Featured Speakers

As the president of one of the world’s great public universities, Ana Mari Cauce is leading the University of Washington in advancing its mission in four key areas: providing a leading-edge student experience, conducting research and scholarship that has a global impact, upholding the UW’s dedication to its public mission and infusing the entire university with a commitment to innovation.

President Cauce will kick off the conference in a pre-recorded message for UW TechConnect conference-goers.

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Aaron Powell is the Vice President for UW Information Technology and CIO, responsible for strategic oversight, planning and direction of the University’s information technology infrastructure, resources and services. In this role, Aaron works with the President, Provost, and appropriate University governance committees to determine information technology strategies, policies, priorities and resource allocations throughout the institution.

Aaron is part of the CIO discussion panel comprised of CIOs from the Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses and the UW Medical Center. They will discuss the role of IT at our University.

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Christy Long is the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technology at UW Bothell and heads the Information Technology Division. Christy provides leadership for the overall direction of central technology for Bothell UW.

Christy is part of the CIO discussion panel comprised of CIOs from the Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses and the UW Medical Center. They will discuss the role of IT at our University.

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Eric Neil is the new Chief Information Officer for UW Medicine. Part of this role is providing leadership for one of the largest projects ever undertaken at UW Medicine and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance — the implementation of a single electronic health record that will bring together inpatient, ambulatory, and specialty care.

Eric has worked in healthcare IT and revenue cycle for 27 years. In the last 12 years, he has served UW Medicine in the roles of; Revenue Cycle Director, Epic billing implementation Project Director, and Director of Enterprise Business Systems.

Eric is part of the CIO discussion panel comprised of CIOs from the Seattle, Bothell and Tacoma campuses and the UW Medical Center. They will discuss the role of IT at our University.

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Jevin West is an Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He is the co-founder of the DataLab and the Director of the new Center for an Informed Public at UW. He holds an adjunct faculty position in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. He is also a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute and Affiliate Faculty for the Center for Statistics & Social Sciences.

Jevin’s research and teaching focus on the impact of technology on science and society, with a focus on slowing the spread of misinformation. He co-developed a course, Calling BS, that teaches students how to combat misinformation wrapped in data, figures, and statistics. He is also the co-author of the book, “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World.”

Jevin will talk about launching the Center for an Informed Public during the pandemic.

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General Speakers

John started his career at Wake Forest University as a UNIX systems administrator; managed the reporting team; led the IT service management (ITSM) implementation; and became PMO director. At Virginia Tech he was University Libraries IT director; he served on the University’s IT council and supported central IT’s ITSM initiatives. He was managing process consultant at TeamDynamix, where he helped higher education institutions improve their ITSM, PPM, and IT governance capabilities.

He joined UW’s Office of Academic Personnel (OAP) in 2018. His team manages OAP’s project portfolio, conducts business process improvements, and manages OAP’s IT services.

John holds the ITIL Expert, PMP, and CGEIT certificates. His career goal is to make people’s lives easier through improved IT management.

John is the speaker for the Sustainable IT Patterns For Smaller Organizations session.

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Rob Fatland is a Research Computing Director at the University of Washington division of Information Technology. He also works closely with the eScience Institute promoting adoption of technologies and methods to advance data-driven research. His background is in earth science, particularly remote sensing of glaciers; and he has a history of supporting K20 outreach in mathematics, science and computing.

Rob is a speaker for the Jupyter Notebooks session.

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Stephanie A. Kraft, JD, is an Assistant Professor at the Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington School of Medicine Department of Pediatrics. She conducts conceptual and empirical research on issues related to building respectful relationships in research and healthcare, with an emphasis on how to ethically incorporate new technologies. Her primary research interests are in understanding how people make decisions about research participation and improving how research teams demonstrate respect to and build trust with potential participants, especially among historically underrepresented patient populations. She also serves as a clinical and research bioethics consultant.

Stephanie is the speaker for the Responsible Conduct Of It In The Age Of Big Data And The Internet session.

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Chris is a Software Developer for UW-IT’s AXDD where he has been responsible for developing, deploying and maintaining the cloud based infrastructure that powers the Jupyter Lab service. His work focuses on extending the existing JupyterHub system to better support multiple concurrent classes. Previously, he has worked in the healthcare field, primarily in the area of Clinical Decision Support.

Chris is a speaker for the Jupyter Notebooks session.

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Professor Sean Mooney has spent his career as a researcher and group leader in biomedical informatics. He now leads Research IT strategy for UW Medicine and is leading efforts to support and build clinical research informatic platforms as its first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) and as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington. He also leads biomedical informatics for the Institute of Translational Health Sciences at the University of Washington. He is involved in a number of other NIH programs including the NIDDK Kidney Precision Medicine Project. Additionally, he has a strong interests in leveraging the community of scientists to collaboratively solve difficult problems in biomedical research through open challenges and has participated in several as an organizer, assessor, predictor and advisor.

Sean has won several awards and accolades for his work. While at UCSF, he won the annual Frank M. Goyan Award for research in physical chemistry. He was part of the team that won the $150k Grand Prize in the Garage.com PlanEDU Business Plan Competition in 2000 and his team was featured on CNN and in BusinessWeek. Previous to his CRIO role, he was an Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. As an Assistant Professor, he was appointed in Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine and was founder and director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core. In 1997, he received his B.S. with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Then receiving a Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of California in San Francisco, and then an American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellowship at Stanford University.

Sean is the speaker for the Responsible Conduct Of It In The Age Of Big Data And The Internet session.

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Karen graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a Masters in Engineering and worked on the Space Shuttle Program. They switched to web development and user interface design. They’ve always been passionate about making tech and information accessible and usable.

To that end, they’ve designed and coded websites; taught front-end web development, information architecture and user experience design; facilitated user testing; maintained websites; and provided tech support. For the last 4 years they have worked for Washington Sea Grant (WSG) as a web developer and IT support. They are co-chair of the WSG Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Workgroup and the College of the Environment’s Diversity Committee, a member of the UW-IT DEI Community of Practice and a UW Accessibility Liaison.

Karen is the speaker for the Accessibility, Usability & Equity in IT session.

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Jim Phelps is the Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy at University of Washington. As Director, his focus is on linking business and technical strategy, aligning investments to this strategy and growing the practice of architecture across UW. He has over two decades of architecture experience in higher education spanning research computing to the student experience.

Jim is also the founder and chair of ITANA (https://itana.org) a professional group for Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects in higher education. Jim has taught leadership competencies, architecture skills and facilitation to architects nationally. He is the winner of the 2018 EDUCAUSE Community Leadership Award.

Jim is the speaker for the Future of the Student Information System (SIS) session and the Data Integration – Critical Capabilities for Higher Ed session.

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Elizabeth Sharpe is assistant director of communications in UW Information Technology where she produces content and develops communications strategies with teams who manage a variety of IT tools and services. She has worked as a writer, editor and communications specialist at the University of Washington for more than 17 years. She has a master’s degree in English, and taught writing for four years at Cascadia Community College and at the University of Phoenix.

Elizabeth is the speaker for the Communicating Tech: The Write Words for the Job
session.

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David’s research involves the development and application of new methods to study dynamic Earth system components with real-world implications for water resources, sea level rise, and natural hazards. His current research uses satellite, airborne, UAV, and terrestrial remote sensing observations to understand the Earth’s cryosphere, with focus on mountain glaciers, seasonal snow, and ice sheets. Much of this work requires modern data science approaches and high-performance computing to answer questions that cannot be addressed using traditional approaches.

David is a speaker for the Jupyter Notebooks session.

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Sessions & Resources

Wednesday, September 2 – 12:30 pm to 4:00 pm
Time	Session
12:30 to 1:00	Coffee and Networking We will convene and then break out to small groups.
1:00 to 1:15	President’s Address President Ana Mari Cauce opened the conference in a pre-recorded message.
1:15 to 2:00	CIO Panel Join us to hear from Aaron Powell, Vice President and CIO for UW Information Technology, Christy Long, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO for UW Bothell and Eric Neil, Interim Chief Information Officer for UW Medicine. These leaders will discuss their views on the role of IT at our University, responses to current events, and the future of IT for our University and partnerships. Session recording for CIO Panel.
2:00 to 2:15	Break
2:15 to 3:00	Responsible Conduct of IT in the Age of Big Data and the Internet Presenters: Sean Mooney, Professor, Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education; Chief Research Information Officer, UW Medicine and Stephanie Kraft, Assistant Professor, Treuman Katz Center for Pediatric Bioethics at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Department of Pediatrics, UW School of Medicine Information technology (IT) has become transformative to almost every aspect of our daily lives. IT professionals, such as ourselves, are constantly tasked with developing, deploying and maintaining the infrastructure that enables this transformation. There are a number of legal, ethical and societal impacts of our work. In this presentation, I will introduce the concept of responsible conduct of IT meant for an audience of IT professionals. I will discuss both real world interests in the deployment of IT services as well as examples of current areas of moral interest in public policy. Session recording for Responsible Conduct of IT in the Age of Big Data and the Internet.
2:15 to 3:00	Communicating Tech: The Write Words for the Job Presenter: Elizabeth Sharpe, Assistant Director, Communications, UW Information Technology Get tips from a veteran communications professional on how to communicate technical information effectively. Session recording for Communicating Tech: The Write Words for the Job.
3:00 to 3:15	Break
3:15 to 4:00	Sustainable IT Patterns for Smaller Organizations Presenter: John Borwick, Director, Project & Innovation Management, Office of Academic Personnel Units and departments with few IT staff still need a wide range of IT services. In this session, John will describe the key steps he used to create a sustainable IT practice within the Office of Academic Personnel. These steps included: Creating a complete list of technical tools in use Analyzing value, costs, and risks from the unit’s perspective Understanding the regulatory and control framework Understanding which IT services ought to be strategic Reviewing the service landscape, particularly with respect to what UW-IT provides Developing patterns to reuse when encountering new challenges Scheduling periodic reviews to help tools converge towards being more sustainable View the promo for this session here. Session recording for Sustainable IT Patterns for Smaller Organizations.
3:15 to 4:00	Future of the Student Information System (SIS) Presenter: Jim Phelps, Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy, UW Information Technology Based on a national conference, I will share what I heard about the future of SIS and then discuss what that means to UW. Note: We will use Mural in this session. If you have NOT used Mural before, please go to the link below and (1) read the “Helpful Hints with Mural” content and then (2) use the Playground around to get used to creating and editing stickies and navigating around Mural. You will be happy that you did. This session was highly interactive in Mural. Please watch this video on The Future of SIS to learn more about this session.
4:00 to 4:30	Wrap up and Networking – Birds of a Feather Style This is an informal networking opportunity based on IT topics that you and your peers submit, offering you the opportunity to meet people using similar technologies or facing similar issues.

Thursday, September 3 –  9:00 am to 2:00 pm
Time	Session
9:00 to 9:30	Coffee and Networking We will convene and then break out to small groups.
9:30 to 10:30	Jupyter Notebooks Presenters: David Shean, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering Chris Land, Software Engineer, Academic Experience Design & Delivery, UW Information Technology Rob Fatland, Research Computing Director, UW Information Technology In this session we explore the use of Jupyter Notebooks in the classroom via infrastructure that allows us to scale to any size course across the campus. Jupyter Notebooks are well established in the research community and their potential in teaching is now being realized. The new service from AXDD uses JupyterHub to provide each student in a course their own standardized environment, customized in advance by the instructor. This replaces the tedious process of ‘many installations on many computers’ with a uniform functional python environment for each student accessed through a browser. Session recording for Jupyter Notebooks.
10:30 to 10:45	Break
10:45 to 11:30	Data Integration – Critical Capabilities for Higher Ed Presenter: Jim Phelps, Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy, UW Information Technology In this flipped session, attendees will watch the presentation about the needs for data integration capabilities. The time in session will be spent working on deepening the understanding of the issues, brainstorming steps forward, and building a shared understanding of why this is important. Please watch this video on Data Integration before this session. Note: We will use Mural in this session. If you have NOT used Mural before, please go to the link below and (1) read the “Helpful Hints with Mural” content and then (2) use the Playground around to get used to creating and editing stickies and navigating around Mural. You will be happy that you did. Session recording for Data Integration – Critical Capabilities for Higher Ed.
10:45 to 11:30	Accessibility, Usability & Equity in IT Presenter: Karen Morrill-McClure, Computer Systems Administrator, Washington Sea Grant Change how you think and practice accessibility. It doesn’t have to be about avoiding penalties, instead it can be about making everything more usable and more equitable. This session isn’t about the laws but about why you should and how you can add accessibility into everything you do. It covers: Basic terms Models of disability Accessibility in terms of usability General design guidelines to follow How accessibility can lead to equity An introduction to Universal Design Session recording for Accessibility, Usability & Equity in IT.
11:30 to 11:45	Break
11:45 to 12:45	Networking Discussion Hour Join us for the virtual Networking Discussion Hour! Various Communities of Practice, services and special interest groups will be hosting Zoom discussions over the lunch hour. Grab some food, and log on to explore new topics and make connections. Find the discussion topic you want to join today. View the groups from the Networking Discussion Hour here.
12:45 to 1:00	Break
1:00 to 2:00	Launching a New Center in the Midst of a Pandemic Presenter Jevin West, Center for an Informed Public (CIP) The Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington was launched in December of last year — a few months before COVID-19 closed the University. Its mission is to: Better understand and resist strategic misinformation Promote an informed society Improve democratic discourse One of our core research areas of expertise is studying rumors and misinformation during crisis events. The current crisis has kept us up day and night. The work we do requires substantial IT infrastructure to collect, curate and analyze the billions of data points tracking misinformation and disinformation online. In this presentation, I will talk about some of our current research projects, ways that we are translating our findings into practice, and how our IT infrastructure has facilitated this research and these opportunities. Session recording for Launching a New Center in the Midst of a Pandemic.

Speakers

Featured Speakers

As a connection engineer, Melody is a master of designing alliances. She believes that relationships are most important in our lives and that unlikely mashups create new perspectives and opportunities. She has built an international ecosystem of sisterhood.

The founder and producer of the WiT Regatta: a week-long conference in Seattle, Vancouver and Amsterdam, she brings people together to advance women in STEM and Tech.

Melody is a nav system for heart and soul – a modern day business Sherpa. She guides not by asking us to replicate her journey- but by inviting us to own our own style, to create what we crave.

Melody’s keynote is >#Relationships Are The True Currency: Discover Your Treasure Chest.

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David M. Levy is a professor at the UW Information School. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University and a diploma in Calligraphy and Bookbinding from the Roehampton Institute in London. For nearly twenty years he was a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, exploring the transition from paper and print to digital media. He has been at the University of Washington since 2000 and has focused on bringing mindfulness training and other contemplative practices to address problems of information overload and acceleration. He is the author of “Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives” (Yale, 2016).

David’s keynote is Mindful Tech – How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives.

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Erik Hofer is the Associate Vice President for Academic Services and Deputy Chief Information Officer at the University of Washington. He provides strategic direction and oversight of key initiatives that advance teaching, learning and the broader academic experience by partnering with students, faculty and staff to offer technologies and approaches that meet their needs.

He also oversees the core student systems that support the University’s academic mission and leads efforts to ensure IT at the University is accessible to individuals with diverse abilities. Previously, he served as Clinical Assistant Professor of Information and the Chief Information Officer at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Erik’s teaching focuses on the application of user-centered design methods to emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social computing, personal informatics, managing IT organizations, and entrepreneurial design. His research focuses on the use of emerging technologies in work. He has studied the socio-technical factors that enable geographically distributed work in science and engineering, examining technology-enabled collaborations in fields ranging from earthquake engineering to neuroscience to high-energy physics.

Erik’s keynote is Innovation in an Empowered Community.

General Speakers

Ani is a software professional with deep industry experience in building large scale software solutions and services. He currently works for the UW Information Technology’s Academic Services Student Program in the team that owns the MyPlan application and services. In his previous work at Microsoft, he led the operating system innovations in networking and virtualization and then helped build and release Azure-Stack, a Hybrid cloud appliance. He was one of the founding members of the Microsoft AI School, designed to infuse the latest breakthroughs in Machine Learning research into products and projects. He has a Bachelor’s in Physics followed by a double Masters in Computer Science and Human Resource and Organizational Development.

Ani is a speaker at the AI-101: Building your first Deep Neural Network session.

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Dusti is an Assistant Director with the Office of Research Information Services. She is also leading technical support, training, UX design and communications. She is passionate about solving complex technical and business problems and improving the way an organization measures itself. Dusti is also a member of the TechConnect Advisory Board.

Dusti is a speaker at the Enabling SSO for Next Generation Application Architectures session.

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Chris Carlson is a Senior Technology Project Manager in the Office of Research Information Services (ORIS). Chris started in ORIS in 2011 and has served in multiple roles (Technical Trainer, Business Analyst, Project Manager) focused on delivering intuitive software solutions that respond to the needs of UW’s research community. As a certified Agile Scrum Master, Chris champions close end-user engagement and collaborative teams that regularly deliver measurable value.

Chris is a speaker at the >User Story Development session.

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Dave Coffey is the Service Manager for Poll Everywhere, a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) classroom response system, and an instructional designer with UW Learning Technologies (LT) under the Provost’s Office. He consults with faculty to assess their pedagogical needs and, working with UW-IT and AXDD, assists with the relevant use of technology in the classroom. He also manages the development of workshops focused on media, design, productivity and teaching.

Dave joined UW in 2010 as a broadcast engineer, in that time he has modernized lecture capture facilities, developed germane media management strategies, and helped launch or grow services like Panopto, UW’s lecture capture system, and MediaAMP, a UW-developed media management platform.

Dave holds a BS in Mass Communications from MTSU and is a Marine Corps veteran.

Dave is a speaker at the Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve the Student Experience and Operations session.

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Nathan Dors is a director in UW-IT where he helps integrate digital identities — mainly UW NetIDs — into the teaching, learning, and research functions of the University.

He is a member of Internet2’s Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity and has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UW Computer Science & Engineering.

Nathan is a speaker at the UW NetID — Enabling SSO for Next Generation of Application Architectures session.

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Rob Fatland attended Caltech and the University of Alaska with a stint at NASA-JPL interspersed. He worked previously at a remote sensing company in Boulder and at Microsoft Research on technologies supporting earth system science. He currently consults at UW across all disciplines from medicine to astronomy — Thematically on how to make computing an accelerator of — and not a hindrance to — research progress at the University of Washington. In spare moments he does STE(A)M outreach.

Rob is a speaker at the Jupyter and Beyond the Infynyte: Tech-driven Acceleration of Research at UW session.

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Sessions & Resources

Time	Session
8:00 to 8:30 HUB Ballroom	Registration Please bring your Husky Card to check in. Tea and coffee will be provided.
8:30 to 9:15 HUB Ballroom	Keynote: #Relationships Are The True Currency: Discover Your Treasure Chest Presenter: Melody BiringerTo sail a ship successfully you need a crew working together, in relationship, toward a greater purpose. Learn how cultivating and tending to your relationships keeps your ship on course and offers you safe harbor in a storm.
9:15 to 9:30	Break
9:30 to 10:30 HUB 214	A Day at the SPA: Things to Know Before You Go Presenters: Peter Giles, Pete Graff, and Glenn SudduthGlenn Sudduth, UW-IT Student Team, and Pete Graff and Peter Giles, Office of the CISO, will share their experiences in building and deploying Single Page Applications (SPAs).SPAs interact with the user by dynamically “building” each web page using code residing in the browser. This effectively moves the presentation layer from the server to the front-end, and can provide a more responsive user experience. But, SPAs are not without their challenges. Those can include increased complexity, framework or tool set lock-in, and potential extra effort for SEO and web metrics. Speakers will address: Benefits and challenges of developing and implementing SPAs. When SPAs make sense and when maybe they don’t. Recommended tools and frameworks. How to get started. Security implications. Lessons learned. Session resources
9:30 to 10:30 HUB 203	An Integrated Solution Presenter: Paul PrestinThe UW enterprise is composed of an ever growing number of custom, vendored, third party, bespoke, SAAS, on-prem, off-prem, in the cloud and under desk solutions. With hundreds of departmental applications working to solve local needs, now more than ever it’s important to understand the UW integration landscape. This presentation will cover the following questions: How best to navigate the options available? How should interoperability be considered when purchasing applications? Who can help assess the integration needs of new and old systems? Come and listen to a walkthrough of enterprise integration patterns and how to reuse UW-IT services as building blocks for an integrated solution.
9:30 to 10:30 HUB Ballroom	Enabling SSO for Next Generation Application Architectures Presenters: Dusti Blood, Nathan Dors, Nik Krumm and Mick WestrickUsers want a single way to sign in to UW applications. Developers want to enable simple, secure sign-on, while maintaining control over application delivery. In this session, we will explore how UW NetIDs can be used for single sign-on (SSO) to applications developed on current and next generation architectures like: Traditional web-based apps. Software-as-a-service. Cloud-native and container-based apps. “Serverless” and “single-page” apps. Apps on limited input devices. SSO technologies are evolving to enable these architectures, and this session will draw on the experiences of early adopters to share approaches and best practices.
9:30 to 10:30 HUB 250	Telling a Strategic Story with Data Presenter: Cara GiacominiThe focus of this presentation is on how to gather data and build appealing dashboards, as well as to ensure that the data you provide offers insights to enable organizational change. It will offer practical tips and candid lessons on how to align what you are measuring to a strategic plan, utilize storytelling elements to connect with your audience and build momentum to move forward.This presentation melds content from a workshop Cara delivered at the 2018 EDUCAUSE annual conference on “Storytelling with Data” and insights from her recent publication in EDUCAUSE on how to “Start Smart with Data.”
10:30 to 10:45	Break
10:45 to 11:30 HUB Ballroom	Keynote: Mindful Tech – How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives Presenter: David LevyThe challenge we face in today’s highly connected world is how to use the technologies well and when to abstain from using them. In this presentation, which draws upon Levy’s research and teaching at the UW, he will discuss some of the exercises and techniques he uses to help students, faculty, and staff establish a healthier and more effective relationship with their digital devices and apps.
11:30 to 1:00 HUB Ballroom	Networking Lunch Lunch will be provided. There will be designated discussion tables where attendees can learn about Communities of Practice, Services and general topics.
1:00 to 2:00 HUB 203	Improve your Development Lifecycle with CI/CD Presenter: Maxime DeravetContinuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a software engineering approach allowing your team to build more reliable releases, improve productivity, efficiency and product quality through the use of automation.This presentation will cover: CI/CD best practices and tools. The importance of code reviews, not only for applications but also for the deployment of infrastructure to AWS. When to use certain types of testing during the application lifecycle. The benefits of migrating from Bitbucket and Bamboo to GitHub and TravisCI. How to make code better and safer using tools like Codacy and Dependabot.
1:00 to 2:00 HUB 214	AI-101: Building your first Deep Neural Network Presenter: Ani AnirudhAI is a General Purpose Technology (GPT) and is primed to disrupt every industry, service and even humankind. This talk is designed to develop the mindset needed to grasp neural networking. It introduces key concepts and terminology used by these new algorithms that attempts to mimic the human brain by allowing machines to learn from data. We will do a brief recap of the recent history of the AI resurgence and then dive into solving a specific problem. We believe uncovering the data mindset, will enable us to add new tools in our belt and better equip us to understand and lead the change. Enjoy the ride.
1:00 to 2:00 HUB Ballroom	Mentors and Messes: Top Ten Leadership Lessons Learned Presenter: Helen GarrettDespite having both a masters and a doctorate in higher education leadership, as an enrollment management leader, Dr. Helen B. Garrett, University Registrar and Chief Officer of Enrollment Information Services most valuable leadership lessons learned have come from mentors being honest and direct and the messes she has found herself in. Helen will share her top ten leadership lessons learned over the past three decades and will invite attendees to share, as well.
1:00 to 2:00 HUB 250	User Story Development Presenters: Chris Carlson, Suzanne May, and Kim Van HornGood user stories are the backbone of Agile projects, but some might ask: What is a user story? Where can I derive information to write a user story? How can I apply a user story in an Agile team? What are some options for constructing a user story? This presentation aims to answer these questions. Whether you have no experience or many years of experience writing user stories, attendees will walk away ready to write better user stories.
2:00 to 2:15	Break
2:15 to 3:15 HUB 203	Containers vs. Serverless: What to Choose and Why It Matters Presenter: Marcellus MilesIT professionals strive to deliver value to stakeholders, customers and users. When doing so we have important decisions to make as we build and move to the cloud. Containers and serverless options both can and should be leveraged. But when do we choose one vs. the other? Why does it matter what and who is operating our applications? How do you test serverless? How can we all avoid vendor lock in or is that lock in even something we should be concerned with?The goal of this presentation is to make sure that you leave with a toolbox that you and your team can use when architecting your applications for the cloud. Reference materials
2:15 to 3:15 HUB Ballroom	Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve the Student Experience and Operations Presenters: Dave Coffey & David MortonLike many universities, the University of Washington has been challenged by the proliferation of technology on campus and increasing student expectations for high-performance, always-on network connectivity.In this session, you will hear how we are leveraging machine learning, analytics, and data-driven insights to proactively improve both the student experience and campus operations. We will examine how machine learning was used to improve UW’s classroom response tool, Poll Everywhere, and discuss in small groups how machine learning could bolster your existing tools and services and give you the opportunity to share your opinions on how machine learning and AI is reshaping the way we work.
2:15 to 3:15 HUB 214	Jupyter and Beyond The Infynyte: Tech-driven acceleration of research at UW Presenters: Rob Fatland and Amanda TanUW Researchers face many challenges. Perhaps their 50-student class needs GPUs to learn how to build Finite Element Models to analyze bridge safety. Perhaps they need to share a database with 20 other doctors studying patterns of post-surgery infection. Perhaps their research team wants to catalog and analyze the genomes of one million Americans. Perhaps their telescope detects millions of changes in the night sky every two days that could be near-earth asteroids or distant supernovae; and the global network of astronomers needs to know what, which, where and when. They may need to understand atmospheric heat transfer from the equator to the poles but key NASA data are vaulted away far from any usable processing power. This talk goes into detail about the suite of tools that we offer to UW researchers to make their jobs easier; both in terms of state-of-the art and the road ahead.
2:15 to 3:15 HUB 250	Public Speaking… scarier than clowns and flying? Presenter: Colleen SchillerPublic speaking often gets a bad rap, bringing a multitude of psychological worries along with physiological responses. We’ve all watched numerous people present formally and informally and can feel when they are succeeding or failing.Come learn tools to communicate effectively and learn to present with your personality; elevating your strengths and minimizing your Achilles heel. Where should I stand? How do I use my voice to keep people interested? Do I really have to look at my audience? Join me and discover that there are 58 things scarier than public speaking.
3:15 to 3:30	Break
3:30 to 4:00 HUB Ballroom	Keynote: Innovation in an Empowered Community Presenter: Erik HoferEmpowered individuals connected through great relationships are a powerful force. TechConnect is a fascinating showcase of ingenuity and innovation at the UW, highlighting the empowered IT community here. This talk will reflect on the day and suggest how we might continue building momentum as we look ahead.

Speakers

Featured Speakers

Dr. John O’Brien serves as the president and CEO of EDUCAUSE, a higher education technology association and the largest community of IT leaders and professionals committed to advancing higher education.

Throughout his 25-year career in higher education, John has deeply engaged with the IT and educational technology sectors. Most recently, he has served as senior vice chancellor for academic and student affairs at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU).

Matthew Trunnell oversees enterprise and scientific computing services and leads the Hutch Data Commonwealth. They are a team of data analysts and software engineers building new capabilities to leverage clinical data for research.

Trunnell came to the Hutch from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where he had served as head of CIO and manager of research computing during.

He is responsible for many key areas at Fred Hutch, including oversight of enterprise and scientific computing services, and leading a team of data analysts and software engineers building new capabilities to leverage clinical data for research.

Michael Hamilton has 25 years of experience in information security, as a practitioner, consultant, executive and entrepreneur. As former Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Seattle, Michael managed information security policy, strategy, and operations for 30 government agencies.

Prior to that Michael was the Managing Consultant for VeriSign Global Security Consulting and in that role provided expertise for hundreds of organizations, from Fortune 100 to small private colleges, and in nearly every sector.

Aaron Powell is the Vice President for University of Washington Information Technology and CIO. He is responsible for strategic oversight, planning and direction of the University’s information technology infrastructure, resources and services. In this role, Aaron works with the President, Provost, Executive Vice President, and appropriate University governance committees to determine information technology strategies, policies, priorities and resource allocations throughout the institution.

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General Speakers

Cassy Beekman, Director

Cassy Beekman is Director of Enterprise Document Management in UW-IT and facilitator of the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium Diversity & Inclusion Community of Practice. She has a particular interest in inclusive workforce development.

Cassy is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Ben Cornell, Software Engineer

Ben Cornell is a Software Architect with the University of Washington’s Office of Research Information Services. He has been implementing Enterprise Resource Planning systems as well as designing and building custom applications for higher education institutions, non-profits, and government agencies since 2001. One of his core areas of expertise is business tier applications development and microservices architecture.

Ben is a speaker at the Modernizing a Monolith: Moving a Legacy Application Forward with Microservices and Angular session.

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Santiago Cortez, Project Manager

Santiago Cortez is a Project Manager within Academic Personnel (AP); an institutional portal for academic personnel administration. AP works to fulfill the University’s mission, vision, and values by supporting the recruitment, appointment, on-boarding, and reporting of academic personnel from around the world.

Santiago worked within AP to help negotiate an enterprise level, cloud-based faculty recruitment solution. This upgraded enterprise agreement allowed AP to work with the vendor to bring the application into full compliance with UW-IT Accessibility Policy and Guidelines. He and others evaluated the application for accessibility and provided a list of known blockers to perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness to the vendor. Santiago and others are currently collaborating with the vendor to resolve the list of blockers.

Santiago is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Karen Crow, Outreach & Health Education Analyst

Karen Crow is the Outreach & Health Education Analyst in the Environmental Health & Safety Department (EH&S), and she is the project manager for EH&S’s website redesign project.

She has over ten years of experience managing public health, behavior change communication and social marketing projects that encourage target audiences to make healthier choices. She coordinates outreach initiatives for EH&S that encourage UW employees to adopt safer work practices to ensure a healthy and safe place for advancing learning, teaching, research and service.

Karen is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Gaby de Jongh, IT Accessibility Specialist

Gaby de Jongh is an IT Accessibility Specialist for UW-IT, Accessible Technology Services. She leads efforts across all three campuses to increase awareness of Accessible Technology, and provides training and expertise on creating accessible electronic documents.

Gaby recently became a certified trainer from Adobe for remediating PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat Pro and has an extensive background presenting training on topics related to technology and disability.

Gaby is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Nathan Dors, Director

Nathan Dors is a Director at UW-IT where he helps integrate digital identities — mainly UW NetIDs — into the teaching, learning, and research functions of the university. He is a member of Internet2’s Community Architecture Committee for Trust and Identity and has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from UW Computer Science & Engineering.

Nathan is the speaker for the UW NetID — Applying value-sensitive design to SSO Options session.

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Rob Fatland, Director of Research Computing

Dr. Rob Fatland has worked at NASA, Microsoft Research, UCLA and as a soft money research scientist at a small company in Boulder, Colorado. He earned a PhD in geophysics in the 1998 and works today as Director of Research Computing at UW-IT. He has a strong interest in STEM education and outreach, currently finding its expression as a middle school math club.

Rob is the speaker for the From Research to Curriculum on the Public Cloud session.

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Pete Graff, Senior Developer and UX Designer

Pete Graff is a web developer and UX designer in the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer, building and designing web applications related to information security and situational awareness. Prior to that, he has run websites for nonprofits, worked in public radio, been a freelance writer, and long ago, analyzed rivets for money.

Pete is the moderator for the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Dawn Hemminger, Agile Software Release Manager

Dawn Hemminger is an Agile Software Release Manager and Certified Scrum Master (CSM) at the University of Washington (UW). She brings 20+ years of engineering leadership, systems service, training and quality assurance expertise in the aeronautical and software industry as well as 10+ years working as a community organizer and workshop leader. Her unique and diverse background in both the private and public sector demonstrates her strengths and accomplishments in planning, coaching, transparency, collaboration and implementation. She has a proven track record of building great teams and guides them to success. Most recently, she managed UW’s Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP) team to launch the enterprise HR system to campus. When not evangelizing Agile and Lean practices, you can find Dawn hiking the beautiful trails of the Pacific Northwest.

Dawn is the speaker for the Packing for an Agile Software Release: A Hiker’s Guide session.

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Ray Hsu, Assistant Director

Ray Hsu is the Assistant Director for Procurement Services responsible for enterprise and large scale IT contracting. Ray has over 20 years of experience in procurement and has been responsible for a wide variety of contracting categories.

Ray is a speaker at the ]Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Zane Kelly, Data Scientist

Zane Kelly is a data scientist for UW-IT’s Academic Experience Design & Delivery Analytics team where he helps develop teaching and learning products to support students, faculty, and staff. He has previously worked in research roles at the UW’s Applied Physics Lab, the WA Legislature, and the Defense Department. His experience also includes teaching undergraduate courses in political science, statistics, and research methods.

Zane is the moderator at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Sridhar Komandur, Software Architect & Data Scientist

Sridhar Komandur, PhD is a Software Architect & Data Scientist with UW-IT Student Information Systems team. He has been involved in software development for a wide range of products like ATM network switches, Internet routers, wireless nodes, distributed messaging technologies, network monitoring software and most recently, academic software systems. He has been with UW-IT for more than nine years, and prior to that he was with Microsoft, Amazon, Lucent Technologies and a couple of startups. Sridhar has recently completed UW’s Data Science Certification program and is currently learning the foundational statistics and data science behind Machine Learning techniques.

Sridhar is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Tom Lewis, Director Academic Experience Design & Delivery

Tom Lewis directs Academic Experience Design & Delivery (AXDD) for University of Washington Information Technology. His team advances teaching, learning, collaboration, and the broader academic experience by partnering with faculty, students, and staff to understand the breadth and depth of their work and inquiry, discovering unmet needs, and offering technologies that address these needs.

AXDD implements and integrates UW online tools, open source and vendor solutions, and cloud services—course delivery tools, email and productivity platforms, the university portal, mobile applications, and data analytics software—that help faculty teach more effectively, smooth students’ transitions through their UW careers, and help the UW community accomplish productivity tasks and everyday work. Tom’s staff includes software engineers, user experience designers, technical writers, project managers, business analysts, and data scientists.

Tom is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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William Li, Senior Security Advisor

William Li, Esq., CISSP, is a Senior Security Advisor within the UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). William provides strategic guidance on information security and privacy risk matters, including security risk management planning, and technology vendor relations. Previously, William was the Information Security Operations Manager at Columbia University Medical Center, where he built the enterprise Data Governance, Risk and Compliance management used throughout that University. William also has experience in private industry as a data center manager for a large international engineering and construction company, and later as that firm’s legal counsel. William has an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science from Rice University.

William is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Henry Lyle, Business Analyst

Henry Lyle is a researcher for UW-IT’s Academic Experience Design & Delivery (AXDD) unit, where he leads a teaching and learning analytics program that innovates technologies for faculty and staff.

Henry is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Ashley Magdall, Web Support Specialist

Ashley Magdall has worked in higher education for over 8 years as a student employee and later as a staff member. She currently trains and supports staff, student employees, and faculty on how to edit the uwb.edu website via the content management system (CMS) Kentico. She incorporates website best practices, including accessibility, into each training.

Ashley discovered her interest in website work and accessibility from her previous position with UW Bothell Information Technologies. Web accessibility provided the opportunity to combine her personal interests; human rights, technology, and access to education. After joining Advancement & External Relations, she became a member of the accessibility team Universal Design for Active Learning (UDAL). This team, along with other campus stakeholders, aims to improve the overall accessibility of UW Bothell.

Ashley completed her undergraduate degrees at the UW Bothell campus where she triple-majored in Society, Ethics, and Human Behavior, Media Communication Studies, and Global Studies and received a minor in Human Rights.

Ashley is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Lauren Manes, User Experience Designer

Lauren Manes is a User Experience Designer with UW-IT Academic Experience Design & Delivery (AXDD) with a background in Library and Information Science and a particular interest in social justice topics.

Lauren is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Karen Matheson, Application Manager

Karen Matheson, MPA, is a seasoned professional in the field of technology, analytics, program evaluation and higher education. Karen has presented on related topics in a variety of professional conferences including the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, Association for Institutional Research and Planning, American Evaluation Association, Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and Association for Professional Researchers for Advancement.

Karen is a speaker at the Benchmarking and Analytics: New Frontiers for Using HR and Payroll Data at the UW session.

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Ann Nagel, Institutional Privacy Official and Associate Vice Provost for Privacy

Ann Nagel leads the UW Privacy Office that was established in spring 2017 to develop universal privacy principles, risk balancing processes, and policies that uphold the UW’s values. The UW Privacy Office will collaborate with individuals across the UW to align the UW’s overall approach to protecting privacy and creating an institution-wide structure and strategy that unifies privacy at all UW locations. Prior to her role in ASA, Ann was most recently the director and associate CISO in the UW Office of the CISO

Ann is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Piet Niederhausen, Enterprise Business Architect

Piet Niederhausen is an Enterprise Business Architect at the UW. As a business architect, Piet helps people design how they work together, by supporting leaders and groups in evolving their strategies, business processes, organizations, and information systems. His current work includes strategy management for UW-IT and business analysis for multiple projects. Piet joined UW-IT in 2014 after twelve years at Georgetown University as a business analyst, IT service manager, and web application developer.

Piet is the speaker for the Defining Business Value for IT Services session.

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Jim Phelps, Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy

Jim Phelps is the Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy at University of Washington. As Director, his focus is on linking business and technical strategy, aligning various technology efforts to this strategy and growing the practice of architecture across UW.

Jim is also the chair of ITANA, a peer group for Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects in higher education. He has over two decades of architecture experience in higher education spanning research computing to the student experience. Jim has taught leadership competencies, architecture skills and facilitation to architects nationally.

Jim is the speaker for the Digital Scenarios and Future Skills session.

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Jim Poland, Cyber Threat Analyst

Jim Poland is a cyber-threat analyst in UW-IT’s Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He focuses on tracking, characterizing, and communicating about threats to UW information. He has been involved in computer and information security for over 25 years, working in the federal sector before arriving at UW in June 2006. Jim has been a Certified Information Systems Security Professional since 2004.

Jim is a speaker at the Threat Landscape at the UW session.

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Matt Portwood, Metadata Analyst

Matt Portwood recently wrapped up a longer-than-expected academic career that started in the swampy flatlands of south Georgia and ended with a year of language study at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan.

When he’s not working as a metadata analyst at UW-IT EIIA or tromping around the woods in search of blackberries, Matt can be found watching ‘how to play the banjo in 10 minutes or less’ videos while restoring old bicycles. Still, he knows he’ll never work as hard as his wife who teaches first grade or his dog Matilda who sleeps 18 hours per day.

He hopes to continue to embody Mencken’s words, “A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”

Matt is the speaker for the Let’s Make Sense of UW Data with Knowledge Navigator session.

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Karin Roberts, Technology Manager

Karin Roberts is a Technology Manager in UW-IT Academic Experience Design & Delivery. Karin manages a team of research scientists who conduct research into educational technology and the student experience at UW. She serves as the service manager for the central learning management system (Canvas, MyUW, the university portal (my.uw.edu), and the Catalyst Web Tools, a suite of Web-based applications that support teaching, learning, research, and work. She leads a talented team of researchers, interaction designers, and software engineers. Karin has played various roles in supporting teaching and learning with online technologies at UW since 2002. Previously, Karin supported distance learning at community colleges, designed online courses for a private e-learning company, and taught political science. She has a BA from Willamette University and an MA in Political Science from the University of Washington. Karin is also a certified Scrum Master, and has been instrumental in the adoption of scrum and agile software development methods in UW-IT.

Karin is a speaker at the Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Paula Ross, Application Management Director

Paula Ross translated her years of experience in the field of Human Resources and a passion for technology into a leadership role helping with the University’s recent implementation of Workday. In her current role, she is responsible for overseeing the team that provides the maintenance, configuration, and optimization of all Workday HCM functions for UW. Prior to joining the Workday implementation she has had a successful career in HR including a role as Director of HR for the UW School of Law.

Paula is a speaker on the Benchmarking and Analytics: New Frontiers for Using HR and Payroll Data at the UW session.

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Paul Schurr, Integration Architect and Technology Manager

Paul Schurr is a UW-IT Integration Architect and the Technology Manager of the Enterprise Integration Platform. He has been a software engineer and architect for more than 20 years — at the UW, Microsoft, Excite, and several startups. In his spare time he enjoys coaching soccer and trying to keep up with his kids.

Paul is a speaker at the DevOps@UW – A Case Study session.

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Rebekah Skiver Thompson, Incident Response & Threat Intelligence Manager

Rebekah Skiver Thompson has over 20 years’ experience working in IT. While she has worked within a number of units in UW-IT, she has spent the last five years working in the UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) where she is currently the Incident Response and Threat Intelligence Manager. Much to the relief of her parents, she has been able to put her Master’s Degree in Psychology to use by profiling threat actors on the UW network. When she’s not hunting for threats, she likes to spend time hiking and camping with her family.

Rebekah is a speaker at the Threat Landscape at the UW session.

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Brian Stork, SQL Developer

Brian Stork had nearly two decades of database engineering under his belt before he wrote his first database unit test. Now he is on a mission to bring test-first attitudes and automation to SQL Server developers.

Brian is a speaker at the DevOps@UW – A Case Study session.

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Jody Tate, Lead Front-End Engineer and Architect

Jody Tate is Lead Front-End Engineer and Architect with the University of Washington’s Office of Research Information Services. He’s been designing and developing user interfaces for the web since 2005. When not struggling with unit tests he’s either reading, writing, or volunteering.

Jody is a speaker at the Modernizing a Monolith: Moving a Legacy Application Forward with Microservices and Angular session.

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Ana Thompson, Learning & Access Designer

Ana Thompson has worked in higher education for the last 16 years in IT, digital learning and instructional design. As a Learning & Access Designer at the UW Bothell Office of Digital Learning & Innovation, Ana enjoys working with faculty members and staff to streamline the use of technology tools and promote digital fluency. Ana has extensive experience with Learning Management Systems (LMS), adult learning, WCAG 2.0, document accessibility, Copyright and Fair Use, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and finding innovative ways to use old and new tools. Currently, she is the lead of the Universal Design for Learning (UDAL) campus initiative and is a member of the New Faculty Orientation, Accessibility Planning Project committees, the Campus Access Guide workgroup and the UW IT Accessibility Task Force.

Ana is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Terrill Thompson, Technology Accessibility Specialist

Terrill Thompson is Technology Accessibility Specialist within UW-IT Accessible Technology Services (ATS). He and his colleagues in ATS work to promote information technology accessibility across campus by providing consultation and support, offering trainings, and developing resources, with the goal of helping the UW community to ensure the technologies we’re choosing and using work for everyone, including individuals with disabilities.

Terrill is a speaker at the Accessibility & Inclusion: “Ignite Style” Presentations session.

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Slides

Keynote: Data Strategy at Fred Hutchinson – Presented by Matthew Trunnell

Keynote: IT Strategy – Presented by Aaron Powell

Keynote: Trends in Cyber Security – Presented by Michael Hamilton

Accessibility & Inclusion – Presented by: Cassy Beekman, Santiago Cortez, Karen Crow, Gaby de Jongh, Ray Hsu, Ashley Magdall, Lauren Manes, Ana Thompson, and Terrill Thompson. Moderated by Pete Graff.

Benchmarking and Analytics: New Frontiers for Using HR and Payroll Data at the UW – Presented by Karen Matheson and Paula Ross

Digital Scenarios and Future Skills – Presented by Jim Phelps

Let’s Make Sense of UW Data with Knowledge Navigator – Presented by Matt Portwood

Packing for an Agile Software Release: A Hiker’s Guide – Presented by Dawn Hemminger

Strategic Approach to Using and Protecting Student Data – Presented by: Sridhar Komandur, Tom Lewis, William Li, Henry Lyle, Ann Nagel, and Karin Roberts. Moderated by Zane Kelly.

Threat Landscape at the UW – Presented by Jim Poland and Rebekah Skiver Thompson

Speakers

Brian Arkills

Brian Arkills is a Microsoft Solutions Architect in the Identity and Access Management group at the University of Washington (UW). Prior to joining the UW in 2002, he worked as a Principal Systems Engineer in the Windows Systems group at Stanford University.

At both the UW and Stanford, he was instrumental in planning and implementing their Active Directory (AD) architecture, integrating each with pre-existing account provisioning systems, while taking an active part in encouraging campus adoption.

Arkills’s technical strengths focus on the Microsoft platform and identity technologies. He has an exceptional proficiency with Active Directory, regularly develops code as an engineer, and helps others architect solutions. He enjoys sharing his technical knowledge and insight via the written medium, embracing transparency and shared understanding.

Arkills has played a key role in the formation and development of the Windows in Higher Education community, by moderating the mailing list, helping plan the annual conference co-sponsored by Microsoft, presenting annually at that conference, and being one of the most active participants on the community mailing list. He regularly collaborates with his peers, and often shares source code.

Jeff Balaz

Jeff Balaz is the Assistant Director of IT for Desktop Support at the UW’s Foster School of Business, where he has worked since 2003.  Prior to the UW, he worked in IT at Seattle University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Chuck Benson

Chuck leads IT strategy & operations, information risk management, and information security for Facilities Services, SmartGrid, & building and space automation systems at the University of Washington. He Chairs the Internet2 IoT Systems Risk Management Task Force, Co-Chairs the UW IoT Risk Mitigation Project with CISO, and has published articles in EDUCAUSE on IoT in Higher Ed. He is also a member of the University’s Unmanned Aerial Systems working group where he contributes to the development of drone policy and is a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot. He has recently completed a book chapter for King’s College London on IoT in Smart Cities. He maintains a blog on managing institutional IoT systems risk at http://longtailrisk.com.

Rupert Berk

As Enterprise Solutions Architect, Rupert helps technology teams and projects create effective solutions that align with enterprise goals. His current work includes the Enterprise Information Platform, UW-IT DevOps, and strategy management for UW-IT. Since joining UW-IT in 2002, Rupert has held lead and architect roles in Identity and Access Management, Web Services, and Enterprise Architecture.

Ashley Bond

Ashley Bond, BA is an Instructional Technologist with the School of Nursing, Learning & Information Technology. Her current areas of interest that include adaptive learning, learning analytics, applying smart interventions, and technology adoption.

The UW School of Nursing Online Education Team (OET) is composed of a faculty member, an instructional technologist and a Graduate Staff Assistant. The OET has developed and maintained a SoN Canvas template, and provided training and support for faculty, staff and students on Canvas, Proctorio, Panopto, and Poll Everywhere. They partnered with faculty for the roll-out of a new hybrid curriculum in which technology was key. Collaboration with faculty and committees is essential to resolve policy and practice issues that arise with new technologies. The OET seeks out and evaluates new learning technologies in collaboration with faculty, staff and students.

Andreas Brockhaus

Andreas Brockhaus is the Director of UWB Learning Technologies and a part-time instructor in the First Year & Pre- Major Program (FYPP). He oversees a unit which leads eLearning, digital media, active learning and teaching with technology initiatives on campus. UWB Learning Technologies provides strategic direction and resources for online/hybrid course development, faculty development, elearning technology resources, campus initiatives such as eportfolios, and digital media pedagogy including managing a media lab. He has presented at 12 conferences over the last 5 years, with the most recent being at at E-Learn – World Conference on E-Learning and QM: Quality Assurance in Online Learning (2016).

Randy Coggan

Randy Coggan has been the Business Continuity Manager for UW-IT since September 2016. Prior to coming to the UW-IT he spent 7 years as both an FTE and Consultant at Microsoft where he was responsible for Business Continuity, Crisis Response and Disaster Recovery for various Business Units. Before joining Microsoft, Randy was in the Fire Service for 20+ years, a majority of which he served as a Chief Officer in Florida, California and eventually Washington. He is a Certified Business Resiliency Manager (CBRM) through the Business Resilience Certification Consortium International, has a Juris Doctorate from Stetson College of Law, is a member of the Washington State Bar Association and is a State Certified Incident Command System Trainer.

Dan Comden

Dan Comden began working with college students with disabilities in 1983 and has been an accessibility technology specialist at the UW since 1992. Providing accessibility solutions to students, faculty and staff with disabilities, he also works closely with web and application developers toward providing equal access to professional and academic resources and applications.

Todd Conaway

Todd Conaway is an instructional designer at the UW Bothell campus. He recently moved to the PNW from Arizona where he was an instructional designer for nine years at Yavapai Community College. He has taught at the college level for 15 years and was a high school English teacher for 10 years. He works hard at combining Dewey, Montessori, Hahn, the web, and crayons into learning environments.

Cara Giacomini

Cara Giacomini is senior research scientist for Customer Service & Support in UW-IT. She has extensive experience conducting quantitative and qualitative studies at the University of Washington. Her work helps the UW-IT understand the technology use and support trends of faculty, students, staff, and researchers. She is also responsible for efforts in peer bench-marking and continual service improvement. In 2003, Cara received her PhD in English and Textual Studies from the University of Washington. Her scholarship and teaching focused on the Digital Humanities.

Peter Graff

Peter Graff is a senior front-end developer and UX designer with the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer. Prior to that, he’s managed web resources for non-profits, worked in public radio, and at one time analyzed rivets on very large aircraft.

Brad Greer

Brad has been working in UW-IT for 27 years — a history that includes a variety of stuff including: X terminals, UNIX servers, managed desktops, security, system architecture, IT strategy, project management, and service management.  Brad is currently the AVP for UW-IT’s IT Infrastructure division,  Chief Technology Officer, and one of the sponsors for UW-IT’s IT Service Management (ITIL) initiative.

Melissa Hall

After 15 years of using her phenomenal computing powers for desktop support, Melissa has taken the knowledge of all the ways computers can be used and misused and turned that into a quest to secure and protect the computing assets of UW Medicine. She received her Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification in 2013 and her EnCase Certified Examiner (EnCE) certification in 2016. As a Security Engineer for UW Medicine, she performs forensic examinations for malware analysis, breach determination, and HR investigations in addition to running the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) for UW Medicine.

Scott Hansen

Scott is the Assistant Director of Computing and Storage for UW-IT. His primary role is providing enterprise-class server and storage solutions, public cloud, database administration, consulting and ongoing IT operational support.  Prior to his past 10+ years at the UW, Scott held IT management roles at Coinstar Inc., and other Northwest technology companies.

Stephanie Harris

Stephanie joined Institutional Analysis at the University of Washington in the fall of 2015 after five years at Central Washington University first working in a graduate program, then in the Office of Research, Evaluation & Assessment in the College of Education and Professional Studies and finally in Institutional Effectiveness.  In 2015, Stephanie completed her Masters of Science in Information Technology and Administrative Management.  Her research and thesis focused on developing a predictive model to identify those students most likely to successfully persist to graduation based on commonly known variables at time of recruiting or application.  As a full time grad student, who was also working full time, and the parent of college students; Stephanie brings a unique prospective and understanding to her work and her research.

Mike Houlihan

Mike Houlihan is an assistant director for Computer Operations (COPS) unit in Customer Service & Support.  COPS provides critical 24x7x365 monitoring and support for a variety of UW-IT infrastructure.  Additionally, COPS provides full support for the UW-IT Enterprise Service Desk during non-business hours.  Mike’s other responsibilities include being the service owner for the Service and Systems monitoring service and process owner for incident management.

Cindy Jenkins

Cindy Jenkins has been a DFIR expert for twenty years, doing forensics investigations and incident response. She earned her EnCE in 2002 and holds degrees in Information Science, Ancient History, and is a Certified Ethical Hacker, as well as holding other certificates in the Digital Forensics Incident Response field. . She specializes in malware analysis and forensics, focusing on discovering footprints and artifact discovery. She uses many platforms and tools  for analysis, sometimes creating her own when there is just nothing that is doing the task quite right. She enjoys taking malware apart, it is challenging, entertaining, and never boring. Her favorite saying is “nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes longer.”

Damien Koemans

Damien Koemans is an assistant director in UW-IT, Customer Service & Support. Damien has served on campus continuously for 20 years as student staff in the campus general access computer labs, the manager of the Odegaard Undraduate Library Learning Commons and as director of IT at the UW School of Law. Damien is the service owner of the Enterprise Service Desk, best known as 221-5000 or help@uw.edu. The Enterprise Service Desk is single point of contact UW-IT and is supported by the Technology Service Center and Computer Operations providing 24x7x365 availability for all UW-IT related questions. Damien is also the service owner for Software Licensing and the process owner for Request Fulfillment.

Sridhar Komandur, PhD

Sridhar Komandur, PhD is a Software Architect with the UW-IT Student Team’s  MyPlan development.  He has been involved in software development for a wide range of products like  ATM network switches, Internet routers, wireless nodes, distributed messaging technologies, network monitoring software and most recently, academic software systems. Sridhar has been with UW-IT for nine years, and prior to that he was with Microsoft, Amazon, Lucent Technologies and a couple of  startups. Sridhar is fascinated by Machine Learning algorithms and is currently pursuing UW’s Data Science Certification program.

Janet Lenart

Janet Lenart, MN, MPH, RN has been using technology for 11 of her 22 years of teaching. For 3 years she has been the Director for Online Education with the School of Nursing.

The UW School of Nursing Online Education Team (OET) is composed of a faculty member, an instructional technologist and a Graduate Staff Assistant. The OET has developed and maintained a SoN Canvas template, and provided training and support for faculty, staff and students on Canvas, Proctorio, Panopto, and Poll Everywhere. They partnered with faculty for the roll-out of a new hybrid curriculum in which technology was key. Collaboration with faculty and committees is essential to resolve policy and practice issues that arise with new technologies. The OET seeks out and evaluates new learning technologies in collaboration with faculty, staff and students.

Richard Letts

Richard Letts manages the Network Operations Center for UW-IT and is also the service manager for the wired network service. Prior to joining the UW in 2010, he worked as an IT manager at a division of Fiserv, Consultant at Alcatel-Lucent, and (before emigrating to the US from the UK) as the manager of the academic computing service at the University of Salford. Here at the UW his focus is on increasing operational excellence by improving network operations, incident response, promoting automation, and increasing self-service. Richard has an MBA from the University of Texas, and ITIL certificates in Service Operations, Service Transition, and Continual Service Improvement.

Salem Levesque

Salem Levesque is the Digital Learning Specialist for the University of Washington Bothell. He is also affiliate faculty in the Nursing and Health Studies. He works with faculty to incorporate digital media assignments into their courses. He is also an advocate for online teaching and use of technology in the classroom. He has presented in a number of conferences over the past 5 years. Including, Educause Connect and Managers of Educational Technology Conference.

Paul Lockaby

Paul Lockaby has been with UW-IT for four years working on the Network Tools and Infrastructure Software Tools services as the Technical Lead. He has worked on a myriad of tools to support UW IT’s network management and monitoring including Puma and EDB plus dozens and dozens of other data collection systems that nobody ever sees. Before joining UW-IT, Paul worked at MITRE doing research for the federal government. He has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.

Jeane Marty

Jeane is a Front-end Web Developer for UW Bothell IT. Drawn to this ever-changing and varied slice of the technical Web stack since 2000, she has been the front-end specialist on projects with both large and small teams in private industry as well as Higher Ed. Jeane also co-leads the UW Front-end Technologies Community of Practice. She believes that writing accessible code is a core competency for any front-end developer and is constantly developing the skill herself.

Mat McBride

Mat McBride started working in Information Systems in 1991, and established his first DR team in 1998 while preparing for Y2K. Mat has been dedicated to disaster management ever since, working in business and 2 technological resiliency, life safety, and crisis communications. Mat has been responsible for the resiliency of thousands of co-workers, hundreds of thousands of customers, billions of dollars, and the entire world (during daytime hours over North America). Mat has been responsible for technological resiliency as Disaster Recovery Manager for UW-IT since November of 2015. He loves his job.

Brian McDonald

Brian McDonald is President of MOR Associates, (Maximizing Organizational Resources) an organization he founded in 1983 based on the belief many organizations do not maximize the contribution most people want to make at work. Brian has increasingly focused his practice on developing leaders and enhancing strategic-thinking. He believes this is particularly critical time for thinking strategically about IT’s evolution in higher education.

Brian’s expertise in designing and delivering leadership development programs has resulted in many positive outcomes including a leadership program for the Provost, Deans and Vice Provosts at the University of Washington. Brian is also co-leading with the former faculty member and MIT CIO Emeritus Jim Bruce an IT-Leadership Program which has involved 35 universities including University of Washington, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, Harvard, UMichigan and UMinnesota. Over 2,500 individuals have participated in this broad initiative to help develop the next generation of IT leaders in higher education.

Brian has taught courses as an adjunct faculty member for the Suffolk University School of Management. He has also presented guest lectures at the Boston University Graduate School of Management and the Tufts University School of Engineering. Brian was awarded his undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts and his graduate degree from Boston University.

Mary Mulvihill

Mary is the Director of the Service Management Office in UW Information Technology. She is the Service Management service owner leading a dynamic team implementing IT Service Management best practices across UW-IT; this includes the development of end to end processes, roles, and the use of UW Connect provisioned on the ServiceNow platform. She serves as Chair to the Internet2 NET+ ServiceNow Advisory Board and supports the UW IT Service Management Board.  Prior to joining UW, she worked for Seattle University, where she also earned her Master of Public Administration (MPA).

UW Connect Service Management is now available as a service to UW units.

Piet Niederhausen

As a business architect, Piet helps projects and organizations succeed by analyzing their strategies, business capabilities, and systems. His current work includes strategy management for UW-IT and business analysis for the Finance Transformation program. Piet joined UW-IT in 2014 after twelve years at Georgetown University as a business analyst, IT service manager, and web application developer.

Jim Phelps

Jim is the Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy at University of Washington. As Director, his focus is on linking business and technical strategy, aligning various technology efforts to this strategy and growing the practice of architecture across UW. Jim is also the chair of ITANA a peer group for Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects in higher education. He has over two decades of architecture experience in higher education spanning research computing to the student experience. Jim has taught leadership competencies, architecture skills and facilitation to architects nationally.

Ray Polakovic

Ray brings his experience leading data management and business intelligence initiatives for financial services, legal services, and broadcast media to the role of Enterprise Information Architect.  Ray has worked at UW since January, 2016.

Hadi Rangin

Hadi Rangin is an Information Technology Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington in Seattle. In this position he is tasked with improving access to information technologies for all users, including those with disabilities. To do this Hadi works with and advises software engineers, designers, administrators, and purchasers on accessible implementation techniques, quality assurance, and best practices. Some of the higher education vendors Hadi has collaborated with include Blackboard, Blackboard Collaborate, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Canvas, Elsevier, Ebsco, Ex-Libris, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, Google, Qualtrics, Ellucian, Workday, ServiceNow, Trumba, Innotas, Zoom, and many more.

Additionally, Hadi teaches the Universal Design Principles for Online Learning as well as the Certificate of Professional Development course in Information Accessibility Design and Policy for the University of Illinois.

Hadi’s educational background is in Computer Science with a focus on Network Management and Human-Computer Interfaces. As someone who is blind, Hadi brings a wealth of personal and professional experiences to the many spheres he works within.

Nick Rohde

Nick is a Web and Content Developer for UW-IT, and manages the IT Connect. He studied Journalism and Web Development at Western Washington University, and has been fascinated with the interconnected web of computers we call the Internet since the days of “Welcome. You’ve Got Mail!” Nick has been tinkering with website design and development since he first got his hands on a keyboard, and has a passion for making immersive and accessible web experiences. Nick facilitates the AccessibleWeb@U Community of Practice at the UW.

Kris Shaw

Kris serves as the Director of IT for the Department of Statistics, having worked in various roles at the UW for 16 years. As part of this role Kris is responsible for overseeing a team that manages a wide array of IT services including a 60+ node Slurm compute cluster, a VMware Horizon virtual desktop environment, Windows Terminal Servers, HyperV and VMware virtual server clusters, GPU compute nodes, web servers and various other IT systems. Kris received his BA from the University of Washington.

Jarek Sierschynski

Jarek Sierschynski is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at University of Washington Tacoma. His work involves thinking about offline human practices as a core element of software design with the capacity to blend working and learning spaces. Drawing on sociotechnical frameworks, he collaborates on software development focused on integration in school and out-of-school learning environments. In his work, technology is inseparable from human agency and practice, i.e., contained in offline human social, institutional and cultural practices. Diversifying notions of technology, Dr. Sierschynski considers software design not only as a means to bridge offline learning and working spaces. His work also seeks the inclusion of technological practices and innovations of non-dominant communities in conceptualizations of STEM. Dr. Sierschynski received his Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences at University of Washington.

Scott Spaulding

Scott Spaulding is a Senior Lecturer in special education in the UW College of Education. His teaching and research focuses on individual-student behavior assessment and support within school-wide positive behavior support frameworks, single-case intervention research design and analysis, and behavioral approaches to online learning and instruction. He has published papers related to school-wide positive behavior support intervention and assessment, function-based interventions, and behavioral assessment. He is co-principal investigator on a behavior support technology project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, and research consultant to develop and evaluate a mobile technology for individuals with aphasia, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Spaulding received his Ph.D. in psychology at West Virginia University and completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in behavioral and family support sciences at the University of Oregon.

Sharee Squires

Sharee Squires, BSN, RN, PhDc is the Graduate Staff Assistant for the Online Education Team of the School of Nursing. She is currently interested in accessibility and universal design.

The UW School of Nursing Online Education Team (OET) is composed of a faculty member, an instructional technologist and a Graduate Staff Assistant. The OET has developed and maintained a SoN Canvas template, and provided training and support for faculty, staff and students on Canvas, Proctorio, Panopto, and Poll Everywhere. They partnered with faculty for the roll-out of a new hybrid curriculum in which technology was key. Collaboration with faculty and committees is essential to resolve policy and practice issues that arise with new technologies. The OET seeks out and evaluates new learning technologies in collaboration with faculty, staff and students.

Wilson Waldrop

Wilson Waldrop brings more than 25 years of experience in information technologies, information systems and operations to the University of Washington.   As an IT Director at the University of Washington, he is responsible for applications and development, departmental and research data, research support, user support, infrastructure, communications, and information security for the Physics and Astronomy Department.  Most recently, Wilson served as the Data Center Manager for Benchmark Electronics and was responsible for corporate IT systems and IT processes for a multi-billion dollar company which operated in 26 offices over 4 continents.  Prior to Benchmark Electronics, Wilson’s entrepreneurial aspirations lead him to found and operate PC Solutions, Inc. and for the next 10 years Wilson and his team of IT professionals provided IT consulting for a wide range of small business in and around central Texas.  Wilson has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University.

Matt Weatherford

Matt manages the computing for a University of Washington research center (CSDE) under the college of Arts and Sciences.  He has been working at the UW for the past 14 years and is a UW CSE graduate.  He is responsible for computing infrastructure, virtual machines, high performance computing, Linux systems, web sites with shibboleth, and high availability services. Matt’s current duties include running a datacenter that supports over 1500 remote access users and finding funding (+outage windows) to continuously improve services. Past work history includes work on medical ultrasound devices, security-as-a-service appliances, software development, and systems administration.

Charles Wesley

Charles Wesley is an Application Development Manager with the University of Washington Bothell campus. In this role, he brings technical teams and administrative/academic units together using an Agile approach. He is happiest when technology can be leveraged creatively to further the educational mission of the university.

Sessions & Slides

Creating Shared Infrastructure

Presenters: Brad Greer, Wilson Waldrop, Matt Weatherford, Scott Hansen, Kris Shaw

Do you have an IT infrastructure service idea about servers, storage, databases, software, asset management, monitoring, developer tools, identity, networking, virtual desktops, or high performance computing that might benefit multiple departmental IT groups at the UW? Come to this brainstorming session to share your idea, build consensus, and help prioritize efforts towards increasing our common IT infrastructure services.

Session Materials: https://docs.google.com/a/uw.edu/presentation/d/1Fkm1skBPnGOe1yOpt9St3-oe-V8wYV-6T85ziLZZU6w/edit?usp=sharing

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Digital Threat: Ransomware

Presenters: Cindy Jenkins, Melissa Hall

Your money or your data!
Ransomware is a very present threat to individuals and institutions: malicious individuals are trying to part you from your money by locking up your files and holding the key hostage. We will present a brief outline of ransomware and its history, some interesting outside cases and then take a deep dive into forensic analysis of the malware: artifacts the malware coders leave behind and some common practices the attackers are using to spread the ransomware. We’ll finish with a live demonstration of a ransomware infection on a virtual machine.

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Making Your Websites More Accessible with ARIA: A Crash Course

Presenters: Jeane Marty, Nick Rohde, Peter Graff, Hadi Rangin

As a web developer and/or designer, how do you rate your skills with ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes? Do you really know how to leverage ARIA’s power to make your sites and applications as usable and accessible as possible?

In this session, we’ll cover:

• Writing HTML that a screen reader can meaningfully understand
• Understanding ARIA landmark roles, and how they relate to HTML5 elements
• Using ARIA to properly describe HTML elements
• Making hiding and showing web content understandable to screen readers (and ultimately, to their users)
• Making web forms accessible

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Aligning Skills and Competencies with Changing Tech Environment

Presenter: Jim Phelps

Environmental shifts and rapid technical change are driving a transformation in the relationship between the business and IT.  This shift requires workers to develop adaptive skills and build new competencies so they can constantly realign to the most strategic needs of the University.  In this session, we will discuss the environmental and technical changes IT faces, explore the shifting competencies needed and engage in group work to understand the new skills required to adapt.

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When the New Normal Isn’t a Choice: Resiliency in a Time of Crisis

Presenters: Randy Coggan, Mat McBride

A sudden earthquake, fire or severe weather brings down your operations leaving your customers without the vital tools they need to do their jobs. How much the disaster affects you depends on how ready you are to face it. What do you do? You pull out your Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plans and get back in business! Recovery priorities are determined through Business Continuity (BC) Planning and realized as a result of Disaster Recovery (DR) efforts. The Technology Business Continuity program within UW-IT, consists of Business Continuity (the resiliency of critical business processes & their critical dependencies) and Disaster Recovery (the recoverability of those critical dependencies and services after a disaster.) Our objective in this presentation is to identify what those planning needs are and how to align them with other planning efforts within the UW. No matter what your role is at the UW, in this seminar you will learn the fundamentals of resiliency planning when “New Normal” isn’t a choice.

KEY TAKEAWAYS & LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Successful recovery from disasters requires BC and DR Planning. Learn the methods used by UW-IT and how you can use them.
• BC and DR are inextricably intertwined. Learn why you cannot have one without the other.
• Your businesses critical processes & supporting technology are determined as part of your BC Plan. Learn how to leverage this information as part of DR Planning.

Session Materials: https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/149/2018/12/27223020/BCDR-TechConnect-Presentation.pdf

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Getting Started with Self-Service DNS and Network Contact Management

Presenters: Paul Lockaby, Richard Letts

Since the beginning of the campus network at UW, handling DNS changes has been a manual process — reaching out to the Network Operations Center and waiting a few days. A new system is coming online this year to allow self service changes of your site contacts and to your DNS data. In this session, learn how to get control of your DNS data, learn how to manage the list of people who can also manage your DNS data and who gets contacted by UW-IT when there are network problems, and then learn how to actually make changes to DNS.

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State IT Accessibility: What Does it Mean?

Presenter: Dan Comden

State Policy #188 addresses the accessibility of IT and impacts all state agencies including the UW. This session will describe the policy and provide resources for improving accessibility of online resources, applications as well as documents and media.

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Agile Projects and Teams: A Shared Journey

Presenter: Charles Wesley

They say the only constant is change, the only question is how much and how fast. At UW Bothell, we have had plenty of both. Faced with growing demands for larger and more complex enterprise solutions on accelerated time lines, our technical teams have moved towards an Agile approach. Adopting agile values and principles, cross functional teams came together to create Agile projects. Iteratively, we expanded from pockets of agility to entire teams incorporating Agile principles. More human communication, increased visibility and transparency of process, and clarity around individual responsibility and ownership transformed the way we work. We have a long way to go before we are a truly Agile organization, however we have learned several lessons and incorporate continuous feedback into our approach.

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5 Motivational Strategies for Training Sessions that Work Better than Food

Presenter: Todd Conaway

Designed for those involved in training faculty or staff, this session identifies five strategies used to engage participants in a hands on approach to facilitating training events. They can be incorporated into any existing hour long workshop or multi day event, and each participant will with a useful web based resource. Rather than the standard PowerPoint or Prezi and a 10 minute questions and answer period at the end of your training, what else can you do? Small group work? Create posters? Paste sticky notes to the wall? As it turns out, there are a number of things you can do to make the usual show and tell more interactive and more enjoyable for faculty. The workshop is run using the hands on strategies discussed during the session. At the end of the session the participants will have created a shareable web based artifact that can also be used as a resource by those in attendance or others. The learning objectives include being able to create active learning events into faculty training, being able to create training resources that are imaginative and varied in material, and to develop more ideas to employ during faculty training sessions. This session is also a conversation, because the speaker is well aware that there are many great options others will have to share.

Session Materials:  https://workbetterthanfood.wordpress.com/

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Towards a UW Application Registry

Presenter: Rupert Berk, Piet Niederhausen, Ray Polakovic

We know there are hundreds of applications in the UW IT landscape, but we don’t have an effective way of capturing or accessing that application information and the relationships between the applications. What could we do with a registry of application information and what would it take? We will consider how an app registry could support use cases such as business impact analysis, IT portfolio management, disaster recovery, threat assessment, access management, incident management, etc, in ways that we cannot today. We will also address what it might take to gather and maintain such information in the “new normal” world of constant change.

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Managing Tech Change: Refactoring an IT Service or Turning Off Legacy Tech

Presenter: Brian Arkills

Kill an ineffective or dated technology or enter into extreme change to fix it? This session will explore some keys to managing technology change. Brian will share lessons learned from retiring NTLMv1 at the UW and refactoring the Nebula service into the Managed Workstation service over a very short period. Some technical details will be covered to keep us concretely grounded, but the focus is on recurring stumbling points and solution patterns.

Session participants will interact on a topic to be chosen, which may include:

• What approaches have helped you manage large changes?
• What stumbling points have tripped you up in large changes?
• What missing capabilities are needed from a managed workstation service?

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Designing Hybrid Learning and Work Spaces in Educational Settings

Presenters: Jarek Sierschynski, Scott Spaulding

This session is for all interested in learning about software design in the context of teacher education and teacher practice. Over the last 5 years we developed a software application, iBESTT (Integrating Behavior Support and Team Technology), to support educators confronted with students’ challenging behaviors in their classrooms. Given the complexity of classroom environments, the app design had to account for both rigor and flexibility. Our analysis of iBESTT use is consistent with decades of findings in the school-based behavior research literature: many educators struggle with the complexity of the support process. To address these challenges a new iteration of the app includes coaching support. A further redesign will link university teacher-ed programs with school districts. This revision will enable iBESTT to become a tool that accompanies teacher candidates through their education into their work environments, bridging boundaries between traditionally separate learning spaces, i.e., between learning, training and work. The developing software design introduced here reflects teacher preparation as a continuous process, an apprenticeship that inherently combines learning and practice.

Key takeaways:

• The challenges of addressing offline complexity in online settings
• The facilitation of practice through software design
• Software design that merges learning and working spaces
• The impact of online environments on definitions of technology, learning, teaching and work

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The Enterprise Service Desk: A Shared Approach to Tier 1 Support

Presenter: Cara Giacomini, Mike Houlihan, Damien Koemans

UW-IT is launching a new service, The Enterprise Service Desk, designed to meet the growing expectation that customer support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The UW-IT Enterprise Service Desk provides Tier 1 support for your local IT Team by resolving customer requests, providing self-service information for common tasks, reducing spam, escalating incidents to your Tier 2 team and taking customer calls and emails 24x7x365. In addition to basic Tier 1 functionality, the Enterprise Service Desk can provide additional services such as system and service monitoring and robust metrics reporting.

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Navigating the Challenges of Building a Large Scale Distributed Application

Presenter: Sridhar Komandur, PhD

There are a number of ongoing challenges in building a modern student information systems application that not only needs to scale for a large number of users but also meet the expectations of users and sponsors. For example, the application needs to deliver business value incrementally with each release and be flexible for changes. Hear about how MyPlan is addressing some of these challenges using ReactJS, multi-tiered middleware architecture, and agile development practices.

Session Materials:  https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/149/2018/12/27223518/SISTechConnect2017.pdf

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Looking Under The Hood: How is Canvas Being Used?

Presenter: Andreas Brockhaus, Salem Levesque

Canvas is by far the most popular learning technology tool used by UW Bothell faculty. But we were faced with a significant challenge: how do we know what faculty development would be most useful if we don’t know how faculty are using Canvas? To answer that question we did a close study of 33 courses, looking at 53 different features in each Canvas course. We then graphed the data gathered from all 53 features, and from that emerged seven focus areas to help guide our faculty development initiatives.  In this session we will examine and discuss these focus areas. Be sure to bring a device (phone, laptop, tablet, etc) to be able to fully participate in the interactive portion of this session.

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Enhancing Service Capabilities Via UW Connect Service Management

Presenter: Jeff Balaz, Chuck Benson, Stephanie Harris, Mary Mulvihill

Engage with a panel of your customer colleagues who are using UW Connect Service Management to mature their service delivery and operational effectiveness. UW Connect is a service management application built on the ServiceNow platform that allows service teams to:

• Use a single system of record to track customer requests and the ensuing activities
• Organize and prioritize work
• Deliver consistent and regular customer communication
• Centrally manage support documentation in a knowledge base
• Predefine request workflows for repeatable request fulfillment activities
• Create dashboards and reports that provide historical and real-time data to help inform service improvement efforts and anticipate staffing needs
• Focus on departmental objectives without managing a support system
• Leverage additional process workflows including incident and problem management
• Leverage UW systems integrations, including UW Groups and email spam filtering
• Combine all of the above to provide excellent customer service and a positive customer experience

UW Connect Service Management is a monthly subscription-based service that allows UW organizations to use the already-configured ServiceNow platform for their own service delivery and support activities. It is a powerful tool for managing the work needed to deliver customer-focused services, and aligns with the UW Transforming Administration Program’s (TAP’s) Culture of Service Program.

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Risk and Reward: Implementing a New Online Proctor System

Presenter: Janet Lenart, Ashley Bond, Sharee Squires

The UW School of Nursing Online Education Team (OET) vetted seven online proctor systems, with the participation of students, staff and faculty. During this session, the speakers will identify lessons learned from the phases of vetting, piloting, implementing and evaluating the Proctorio system and share strategies used to balance a student-centered emphasis with academic integrity goals.

Session Materials:  https://uw-s3-cdn.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/149/2018/12/27223632/UW_IT_PP_Final.pptx

Speakers

Darwin Alonso
Dr. Darwin Alonso is the Computing Core Systems Admin at the Institute for Protein Design. He earned his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry in Dr Ken Dill’s lab a the University of California, San Francisco working on mean field statistical thermodynamics theory treating the dependencies of protein stability on temperature, solvent, and pH. He worked as a Research Associate and systems administrator for Professor Valerie Daggett the University of Washington, Department of Medicinal Chemistry. He investigated protein dynamics using molecular dynamics simulation. During that period he advised academic and industrial research laboratories on the setup of economical high performance computer clusters. He joined Dr. David Baker and Bill Schief’s labs in 2008 as a systems administrator. Since then he has concentrated on optimizing the group’s research-computing budget by balancing the constantly changing costs and availability of CPU cycles and storage with the “creative” use patterns of their computationally diverse group of roughly 150 people.

Jeff Balaz
Jeff is the Assistant Director of IT for Desktop Support at the UW’s Foster School of Business, where he has worked since 2003.  Prior to the UW, he worked in IT at Seattle University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Heidi Barta
Heidi leads the UW Information Technology Organizational Development (OD) unit. She is responsible for developing programs and resources that continuously improve the organization, engage and retain staff and support supervisors. She and the OD team focus on organizational assessment, strategic planning, workforce development, community building and team collaboration, recognition, onboarding, and retreat/meeting facilitation. She began work at the UW in 1998 with an initial focus on student experiences. She then transitioned into Human Resources with a focus on staff and then followed her passion into an Organizational Development role. She earned a bachelor’s degree in speech communication from the UW and focused her educational experience on communication best practices in organizations and classrooms.

Elizabeth Bedford
Elizabeth is the Data Services Projects Librarian at Suzzallo/Allen Libraries. She is committed to supporting researchers throughout the data lifecycle, from the initial data management plan through final deposit in an appropriate archive. Before coming to UW she was an independent contractor working with organizations like the Digital Curation Centre, the Edinburgh University Archive, and the EDINA National Data Centre. She received her MS in Information Science from the University of Michigan School of Information in 2010.

Chuck Benson
Chuck leads IT strategy & operations, information risk management, and information security for Facilities Services, SmartGrid, & building and space automation systems at the University of Washington. He chairs the University’s IT Service Management Board as well as the Task Force on Protection of Industrial Control Systems/Internet of Things risk. He is also a member of the University’s Unmanned Aerial Systems working group where he contributes to the development of drone policy and is a former Marine Corps helicopter pilot. He maintains a blog on managing institutional IoT systems risk.

Rupert Berk
Rupert is an Enterprise Solutions Architect in UW-IT. He currently helps to develop architectural criteria and models to enable projects, services, and acquisitions to execute more effectively and in alignment with strategic goals. In his 13 years at the UW, Rupert has also worked in identity and access management as well as system integration roles. He teaches Aikido and attempts to realize lessons about peaceful conflict resolution from that practice in his daily life.

Andreas Brockhaus
Andreas serves as the UW Bothell Director of Learning Technologies in the IT department. He has over 20 years of experience leading teaching and learning efforts, including active learning, digital media, eLearning and other initiatives. His department provides support for faculty development, instructional design, learning tools and student labs. He also teaches in the First Year and Pre-Major Program at UW Bothell.

Anja Canfield-Budde
Anja Canfield-Budde is the Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics in UW Information Technology. She is responsible for the leadership, strategy and execution across key areas of enterprise information management, such as data warehousing, business intelligence, metadata, information architecture and data integration. Before joining higher education in 2008, she spent close to 10 years at Microsoft. Canfield-Budde presents nationally on information management at higher ed and industry conferences. She has served for several years on the Executive Board for HEDW and is currently a chair of the Evanta Executive Summit.  She holds graduate degrees from the University of Hull, U.K., the University of Freiburg, Germany, and the University of Washington.

Colleen Carmean
Colleen serves as the University of Washington Tacoma’s Assistant Chancellor, responsible for the Faculty Resource Center, Academic Technologies and Institutional Research. Her work lies in research and design of integrated knowledge systems, including next generation environments for e-learning. She teaches critical thinking and applied computing. Current research includes measuring the affordance of technologies in the user experience (UX).

Jason Civjan
Jason is the UX Team Manager for Academic and Collaborative Applications, where he has been working for 9+ years helping to ensure that User Experience remains central to their work and vision. In 2002, he received his master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and migrated to Seattle in the summer of 2006 to live happily ever after.

Julie Cruse
Julie serves as the Manager of Instructional Design & Outreach for UW-IT Learning Technologies. She designs and engages across diverse media and industries “in out (and) thru” learning, sciences, health, games and arts. Recipient of over thirty grants and such honors as Outstanding Alumni in Innovation (Ohio Today, Summer 2009 p19), Cruse created Oberlin College Media Center (OCMC).

Rick Ells
Rick is the Senior Webmaster for UW-IT Communications. Rick is a Web designer, graphics artist, instructor, and technical writer with over 30 years of experience at the UW. He keeps IT Connect fresh and vibrant and he leads the AccessibleWeb@U community of UW web designers, developers, and other interested individuals who discuss and share ideas on accessible web design. Rick is an avid photographer who especially enjoys outdoor photography.

Rob Fatland
Rob grew up in Tacoma and received a BS in Physics from Caltech in 1987. He subsequently worked at NASA-JPL for six years in radar science and taught briefly at UCLA before returning to graduate school at the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks. He earned a PhD in Geophysics from UAF in 1998 with dissertation emphasis on sub-glacial hydrology observations from orbital satellites. He worked at Vexcel Corporation in Boulder Colorado until 2006 on remote sensing and building ruggedized sensor networks intended to operate autonomously for long periods in harsh environments. He moved to Microsoft in 2006 where he continued to work on the applications of technology to data acquisition and analysis in geosciences, then relocated to the Pacific Northwest to join Microsoft Research in 2010. He has done extensive work in visualization of multidimensional data, both abstract and geospatial, and has worked collaboratively with several UW researchers in recent years on oceanographic and geochemistry projects. In fall 2015 he accepted a position at UW IT as Director of Cloud and Data Solutions. He now works with research teams across UW to determine if and how cloud computing can be a solution to meet growing challenges in data science and research data management. He can be reached at rob5@uw.edu and holds office hours every Wednesday morning at the WRF Data Science Studio.

Krista Greear
Krista’s love for helping students, technology and data is a great fit for her position as the Access Text and Technology Manager, where she provides accessible textbooks, course packs, articles and other instructional materials. She has served in higher education disability services, providing students with alternate text for 7.5 years — as a part-time employee at Central Washington University and full-time at the University of Washington. She is involved with the UW’s Web Council, Approaches on Accessibility interest group, Online Advising group and Husky Toastmasters. In her graduate work in Educational Technology, Krista aims to learn more about the tools, content and strategies faculty use to teach online and hybrid courses in order to train faculty how to create accessible-born courses, degrees and programs.

Alisa Hata
Alisa is the former Deputy Chief Operating Officer for UW Information Technology.  She started at the UW in 1990 as Manager of Project Planning & Administration for the Networks & Distributed Computing Division of Computing & Communications (C&C), and over the years held a variety of titles.  Prior to coming to the UW, Alisa worked for over 8 years in healthcare at the Virginia Mason Medical Center.  She holds an MBA from the University of Washington with concentrations in Management of Information Systems and Operations Management.

Bernease Herman
Bernease is a data scientist at the UW eScience Institute, where she collaborates on data-driven research across academic fields in addition to computational methods research. Prior to eScience, she worked on inventory optimization models as a software development engineer at Amazon. Bernease earned her BS in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Michigan.

Florence D. Hudson

Florence is Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Internet2, a not for profit consortium of 300+ academic institutions and 150+ research organizations developing innovations around the Internet. In this role, Florence works with the Research and Education community in the identification and development of new innovations around the Internet and the services of the future. She leads Innovation Working Groups in the Internet of Things, End-to-End Trust and Security, and Distributed Big Data and Analytics including universities, industry, national labs, agencies, regional networks and international partners.

Prior to Internet2, Ms. Hudson was with IBM for 33 years in many leadership roles including Director of Business Development for the Internet of Things, Vice President and Director of Corporate Strategy, Vice President of Strategy & Marketing in Systems & Technology Group, and Vice President of Strategy & Marketing and acting Chief Technology Officer of the Global Industrial Sector. In these roles she led the development of business and technical strategies across IBM including the Internet of Things, energy & environment, smarter planet, smarter buildings and cities, water management, IBM Watson and cognitive computing, analytics, cloud computing, growth markets, financing, hardware, software and services.

Ms. Hudson has lectured widely on many topics, including a TEDx talk regarding energy and the environment in 2012, as well as at Advanced Energy Conferences, Princeton, Columbia and Harvard Universities, and in many countries including China, South Korea, Vietnam, Spain, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Trinidad. She has also lectured most recently on “IT: The Endless Frontier”, “Critical Success Factors for Work, Life and Leadership” and “Diversity and Inclusion: Make the case and make a difference”.

She spent a year as executive-on-loan and IBM Vice President of Strategic Planning for the Society of Women Engineers where she developed new programs to inspire girls and women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics worldwide.

Prior to IBM, Ms. Hudson worked for Hewlett-Packard, Grumman Corporation and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on projects including solar power satellites, the space shuttle program and future missions around Jupiter.

Ms. Hudson serves on the Princeton University Technology Advisory Council and Princeton University Advisory Council for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She served on the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees of the Society of Women Engineers. She is an Executive in Residence at Adelphi University School of Business. She has been honored with the Society of Women Engineers Upward Mobility Award for her exemplary business and technical leadership and for serving as an outstanding mentor and role model for women worldwide, and was honored as a Wise Wonderful Woman of Westchester. She was honored as a Top Woman of Machine to Machine in 2014 by Connected World Magazine.

Ms. Hudson graduated from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and has attended executive education at Harvard Business School and Columbia University. She is married with two adult children.

Jake Kulstad
Jake serves as the Manager of Instructional Technology & Support for UW-IT Learning Technologies. His passion is helping people solve technological challenges, whether it is with the Canvas LMS or with emerging technologies like 3D printing. On a day-to-day basis he works with a large team in Learning Technologies to keep the tech support trains running smoothly.

Susan Lawrence
Susan is Director of Human Resources for UW-IT Information Technology. She has more than 25 years’ experience working in large academic computing environments and  has held a variety of leadership roles in the Information Technology arena from Budget Analyst, Supervisor of Purchasing and Inventory, Manager of Campus-wide Licensing, and Manager of Administrative Services.  Prior to coming to the University of Washington, she  worked at the University of California – Berkeley in the Information Systems and Technology organization as part of the Management Policy and Development team. Susan completed her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Washington.

Tom Lewis
Tom directs Academic & Collaborative Applications (ACA) for University of Washington Information Technology. His team advances teaching, learning, and research by investigating computing trends, identifying user needs, crafting innovative applications, and integrating open source technologies, vendor solutions, and cloud services. ACA services include online course delivery tools, research technologies, email and calendaring solutions, Web publishing, collaboration tools, mobile applications, digital media platforms, and the university portal. He is a recovering political scientist.

Jeane Marty
Jeane is a Front-end Web Developer for UW Bothell IT. Drawn to this ever-changing and varied slice of the technical Web stack since 2000, she has been the front-end specialist on projects with both large and small teams in private industry as well as Higher Ed. Jeane also co-leads the UW Front-end Technologies Community of Practice. She believes that writing accessible code is a core competency for any front-end developer and is constantly developing the skill herself.

Rob McDade
Rob has been the Information Architect for the University of Washington’s Enterprise Data & Analytics team within UW-IT since December 2013. Prior to joining the University he held various Architect, Enterprise Architect, Analyst and Developer roles over 15 years split between T-Mobile USA and Amazon.com. His undergraduate degree is in Music from the College of the Holy Cross and he also earned an MBA from Seattle University in 2013.

Shane McDowell
Shane has worked for UW-IT for more than 15 years.  Shane is currently a Technology Manager for the Network Implementation (NIM) team.  NIM is primarily responsible for provisioning and maintaining the UW Campus and Medicine networks and provides ongoing tier2 support.  Shane is also a Request Fulfillment Process Manager and is the Service Manager for the Wi-Fi Wireless service.

Nate McKee
Nate serves as the Director of Learning Technologies for UW-IT Academic Services. He has several years of experience in designing informal learning spaces and computing facilities, supporting teaching and learning through the use of academic technologies and multimedia, and is passionate about the professional development of his entire team including the very talented student employees. His unit provides faculty and students with support for instructional design, instructional technologies, and innovative computing spaces and studios within Odegaard Library.

Zephyr McLaughlin, CISSP, CSFA
Zephyr is an Information Security Architect in the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer. He has worked for UW since 1997. In his current role he is responsible for designing, coordinating, and implementing operational practices, services functions, and tools as needed to achieve UW’s information security and risk intelligence program goals.

Sean Mooney, PhD
Dr. Mooney has spent his career as a researcher and group leader in biomedical informatics. He now leads Research Information Technology for UW Medicine and is leading efforts to support and build clinical informatic platforms as it’s first Chief Research Information Officer (CRIO) and as a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education at the University of Washington.

In addition to collaborative activities in informatics, he continues to maintain a research group with a focus on data science with an emphasis on translation and precision medicine. Additionally, he has a strong interest in leveraging the community to solve difficult problems biomedical research through challenges. To that end, he is a co-organizer of the Critical Assessment for Functional Annotation (CAFA) and participates as a predictor, assessor and advisor for the Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation (CAGI).

Finally, he is actively involved in entrepreneurship and is interested in the commercialization of academic technologies. He was the Grand Prize winner in the $150K Garage.com PlanEDU Business Plan Competition in 2000, which was featured in Business Week, live on CNN, and though out the media. He later co-founded BioE2E in Silicon Valley and the Indiana Biomedical Entrepreneur Network in Indiana, both as non-profits focusing on biomedical entrepreneurship that brought together entrepreneurs, investors, and those looking for opportunities in startups. He regularly consults for industry and as a reviewer of grants and contracts for the National Institutes of Health.

Previous to his CRIO role, he was an Associate Professor and Director of Bioinformatics at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Marin County California. As an Assistant Professor, he was appointed in Medical and Molecular Genetics at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he received tenure, and was founder and director of the Indiana University School of Medicine Bioinformatics Core. He received his B.S. with Distinction in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1997, his PhD at the University of California San Francisco in 2001 and was the American Cancer Society John Peter Hoffman Fellow at Stanford University from 2001-2003.

Mary Mulvihill
Mary leads the Service Management Office in UW Information Technology. She is the Service Management service owner leading a fantastic team implementing IT Service Management best practices in UW-IT, including the UW Connect Service Management tool provisioned on the ServiceNow platform. This team is working towards expanding Enterprise Service Management to the university. She is also project director for the HRP Integrated Service Center project, part of the HRP Modernization Program. She joined UW in 1996 after working for Seattle University where she earned her Master of Public Administration degree.

Maureen Noonan
Maureen is a Technology Resource Manager in UW-IT’s Computing Infrastructure division. She started working at the UW in October 1996 as a Computer Operator, coming from a career in oceanography and geophysics. From Operations, she moved into and subsequently became the Manager of Staging, the group responsible for campus mainframe processing, managing the team for 11 years. She completed her Master of Management degree from UW Bothell along the way. She spent five years in an organizational development role, initially for Information Management and then for all of UW-IT until recently returning to management.

Jim Phelps
Jim is the Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy at University of Washington. As Director, his focus is on linking business and technical strategy, aligning various technology efforts to this strategy and growing the practice of architecture across UW.

Jim is also the chair of ITANA a peer group for Enterprise, Business and Technical Architects in higher education. He has over two decades of architecture experience in higher education spanning research computing to the student experience. Jim has taught leadership competencies, architecture skills and facilitation to architects nationally.

Chance Reschke
Chance is the Director for Research Computing for UW-IT, the campus IT organization for the University of Washington. He has more than 20 years of experience in the design, deployment, and management of large scale research compute and storage platforms.

He was a member of the team responsible for the creation of the Beowulf commodity-cluster / distributed-memory approach to scalable computing which has come to dominate High Performance Computing (HPC) at all scales over the last two decades.

He has played a leading role in creation of scalable compute and storage environments in more than eight universities and research institutes in four countries. Over his 17 years at UW he has been a leader in the deployment of computer power in the service of research in science and engineering.

Chance’s expertise includes cluster and parallel computer systems, large scale and high performance storage, distributed computing, and networking.

Ariel Rokem
Trained in cognitive neuroscience (PhD: UC Berkeley, 2010) and computational neuroimaging (Postdoc, Stanford, 2011-2015), Ariel is now a data scientist at the University of Washington eScience Institute, where he continues to develop software for the analysis of human neuroimaging data, teaches reproducible and open research practices, and collaborates with researchers from a variety of fields to advance their data-intensive research.

Kaitlyn Schirmer
Kaitlyn is the User Experience Lead for ORIS. She started with ORIS as an undergraduate assistant while working on her Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) degree at UW, then was hired as a full-time Interaction Designer after graduating in 2012. She took over leadership of the UX team in October 2014. Kaitlyn has worked as a designer on a variety of ORIS products including SAGE and the UW research website. Most recently she has been leading the design effort for MyResearch, with a strong focus on utilizing mobile-friendly UI patterns.

Paul Schurr
Paul is an Integration Architect and the leader of the Enterprise Integration Platform team. He has worked at tech companies large and small, ranging from a 6-person start-up to Microsoft and AT&T. In his spare time he enjoys running and coaching his daughter’s soccer team.

Jody Tate
Jody is the Lead Front-End Engineer and Architect with the University of Washington’s Office of Research Information Services. Over the years he’s designed and developed user interfaces for iOS apps, responsive websites, and mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized web applications for UW, a startup, and AT&T. He now focuses on building enterprise-scale web applications using AngularJS, HTML5 and CSS3.

Keith Van Eaton
Keith is the Metadata Manager for the Enterprise Data & Analytics team. In addition to managing the institutional metadata associated with the Enterprise Data Warehouse (the UW’s historical repository for the administration data), Keith works with partners to help define report-level metadata to make reports more easily understood. Keith also has a background in technical training and education and enjoys the challenges of making complex technology more easily understood. When not chasing after two delightful children with his wife, Keith can be found backpacking into Washington’s peaks and fire lookouts, playing guitar or in search of new ale houses.

William Washington
For over 10 years William has been a pioneer and leader in User Experience Design within UW-IT. Starting with UW-IT after completing a Master’s degree in Human Centered-Design and Engineering (HCDE) at UW in 2002, over the years he’s built and led two UI/UX design teams within UW-IT. He has served as UX Architect for Kuali Student, and had the rare opportunity to design, architect, and help build an LMS, an SIS, and most recently a student portal, MyUW. Ever the advocate for User-Centered Design methods, he continues to work towards better and accessible user experiences, and towards helping the enterprise mature its UX capabilities.

Charles Wesley
Charles is a Technology Project Manager with UW Bothell Information Technologies. He has over ten years of experience as a higher education technology professional in diverse campus settings ranging Seattle University, UW Seattle, and UW Bothell. Charles has a background in web development, data integration, and enterprise architecture and strategies.

Mick Westrick
Mick is Director of IT at the Foster School of Business.  He has 25 years of experience with information technology in higher education, and has been at UW since 2004. Foster IT supports desktop and classroom technology and provide research computing support for faculty, staff and students. When not working, Mick enjoys cooking and baking.

Sessions & Slides

A Journey to the Cloud in 3 Acts: Office365, GoogleApps for Education, and Amazon Web Services

Presenter: Tom Lewis

Embracing Software/Infrastructure as a Service is critical for “future-proofing” the enterprise. Tom will detail his team’s current progress on the road to Office 365, GoogleApps, and Amazon Web Services as well as share roadmaps for the future.  Additionally, Tom will describe the personal and professional changes, the shifts in how his team works, and the accommodations required of end users to make this journey.

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Implementing Internet of Things (IoT) Systems to Maximize Institutional Value

Presenters: Chuck Benson, Florence D. Hudson

Internet of Things (IoT) systems offer great potential value to higher education institutions. From energy management to research automation systems to systems that enhance student, faculty, and staff safety, IoT systems offer great promise. However, these systems also bring their own risks and need to be thoughtfully procured, implemented and managed in order to provide the greatest value. This talk will discuss this rapidly evolving opportunity as well as some considerations for thoughtful implementation.

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System Integration: Managing the Change Through the Enterprise Integration Platform

Presenters: Rupert Berk, Paul Schurr

Business transformation is inherently disruptive, requiring re-plumbing of business processes and system configuration to deliver better business outcomes. UW-IT Enterprise Architecture has positioned the Enterprise Integration Platform (EIP) as one way to better manage this disruption at the system level. This session will talk about how the HRP Modernization program, as the first of these major business transformation efforts, has leveraged the EIP as a more efficient and resilient way to manage data integrations through system insulation, consistent modeling, shared business rules and metadata, and common monitoring.

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Metadata—A Love Note to the Future

Presenters: Rob McDade, Keith Van Eaton

You’re sitting at your desk and you need to find something—an old email, a file on your computer, or perhaps an online reference. You start your digital search, fingers crossed. Thankfully, mercifully, what you seek appears on the list. Whew!

How did that happen? At some point in the life of that item, content was created that enabled your search tool to find it. Said another way, your item became automatically discoverable because it was associated with relevant metadata. That metadata, those crumbs, those love notes to the future, made that discovery possible.  And that’s just one way metadata is useful!  Metadata equals “Context” and Context enables “Connections”. To the past, to the future, to your work.

In this talk, Rob McDade and Keith Van Eaton will share metadata’s role in building connections and future-proofing an organization’s data and systems, through the use of Scenario Analysis, Strategic Planning, and Knowledge Navigator, UW’s metadata tool for administrative data.

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Future-Proofing Data-Intensive Discovery at the University of Washington eScience Institute

Presenter: Ariel Rokem

We are living in the era of data-intensive discovery: across campus, in a variety of different fields, researchers are increasingly challenged to tackle the questions that they need to answer with the help of larger and more complex data-sets. For example, in many fields of the Social Sciences, where a few years ago important questions were typically answered through surveys of a few dozen participants, data are now pouring in at the scale of entire social networking websites. While the explosion of large and rich data-sets presents tremendous opportunities, and promises to deliver important and unique insights across many different fields, they also present some challenges. Effectively tackling these data requires a new set of skills and tools that researchers in many fields do not yet have. In parallel, as data-intensive research is becoming the norm, many research fields are confronting a crisis of openness and reproducibility: the steps required to derive a result from data are often not recorded in research papers. As researchers are preparing for a future of ever-larger, even more complex data-sets from which to derive important discoveries, the need for practices, tools and roles within the University, to shore up this research, is becoming urgent.

The University of Washington eScience Institute supports data-intensive discovery through the development of these tools, the formulation of research practices, and through education at many different levels. In this talk, I will discuss a few of the ways that we are future-proofing the research on campus and beyond for the data-intensive research of the years to come. I will discuss how our collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach is not only future-proofing existing fields, but also bringing about novel interactions between different fields, to spark new and innovative research that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Slide presentation

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IT Support for Research—A Panel Discussion

Presenter: Darwin Alonso, Elizabeth Bedford, Rob Fatland, Bernease Herman, Chance Reschke

Computational research takes many forms, ranging from data management and modeling with spreadsheets on individual researcher’s laptops, to large scale undertakings on our campus cyberinfrastructure, including Hyak, to efforts using tens of thousands of volunteers in the BOINC and Open Science Grid networks. Matchmaking between researcher’s problems and the most appropriate computational platform, including software tools, is central to what those providing IT support to researchers do. Today’s panel includes representatives from established, large scale computational research efforts, as well as those invested in emerging alternatives, including the commercial cloud.

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Supporting Faculty and Driving Student Success: Engaging Academic and Learning Technologies Across the UW System

Presenters: Andreas Brockhaus, Colleen Carmean, Julie Cruse, Jake Kulstad, Nate McKee

We have invited representatives from UW Bothell’s Learning Technologies, UW Tacoma’s Academic Technologies, and UW Seattle’s Learning Technologies units to present thought-provoking and engaging examples of innovative ways in which they are supporting faculty and enabling student success on each of the UW campuses. The topics will cover Moving From One to Many: Refocusing Faculty Development on the Programmatic Rather Than Individual Level, e-Nudging Students to Engagement and Success, and Leveraging Historical Data and Trends From Diverse Resources to Guide Outreach and Support Activities in the Teaching and Learning Environment. Each session will be roughly 15 minutes in duration and we will ask audience members to save questions until the panel session immediately after.

Slide presentation

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Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Pedagogy With an Eye on the Future

Presenters: Andreas Brockhaus, Colleen Carmean, Julie Cruse, Jake Kulstad, Nate McKee

The panelists from the “Supporting Faculty and Driving Student Success: Engaging Academic and Learning Technologies Across the UW System” session will return to discuss a combination of themes related to supporting faculty, driving student engagement and the concept of future-proofing in the context of academic technology. Also we will encourage the audience to pose their own questions to the panel, and the presenters will have opportunities to answer follow-up questions about their presentations during this time.

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Creating an Institutional Roadmap for Improving IT Accessibility

Presenters: Rick Ells, Krista Greear, Jeane Marty, Mary Mulvihill

Campus-based technology should be accessible for students, faculty and staff with disabilities, as required by law. Improving digital accessibility is a long-term process, involving many stakeholders. In this session, you and other attendees will map impediments to creating inclusive IT at the UW, share your experiences in trying to deal with them, and then sketch out an institutional roadmap for going forward.
Audio recording

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Single-Page Applications—Avoiding Spaghetti Code

Presenters: Zephyr McLaughlin

Building single page applications (SPAs) enables a wide range of new Web development possibilities, but with those added benefits comes new and sometimes unexpected challenges. One of the biggest challenges is keeping your codebase from becoming a mess. This session will explore common pitfalls with building SPAs and patterns for avoiding these pitfalls.

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MyResearch: UI

Presenters: Kaitlyn Schirmer, Jody Tate

MyResearch is an enterprise-scale web application that provides personalized, scannable summaries of research administration information. The product is in an early phase with a long road ahead, so we are always looking for ways to set ourselves up for future success.

In this talk we’ll share the various techniques that we have used to reduce the accumulation of technical and UX debt and enable the gathering of usage data that will inform future decisions. Hear about employing mobile-friendly interaction patterns, leveraging the modular capabilities of AngularJS, gathering detailed analytics with Segment & the UW Person Web Service, and supporting targeted releases with the UW Groups Web Service.

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Design Methods for Future-Proofing

Presenters: Jason Civjan, William Washington

Is future-proofing possible? What does it mean to future-proof your design? While it is enticing to chase a perfect product that you can release once and move onto other things, to do so is a formula for failure. This is because it is impossible to predict future user needs or technology trends with the accuracy needed to design a product that will remain successful without an investment in continuous improvement.

Technology evolves, user needs and expectations evolve, and therefore products must also evolve. The best way to future-proof is to begin with a streamlined product that clearly meets current, known needs, and by using design and development methodologies that allow a product team to respond to the inevitable changes in needs and technologies through rapid iteration.

Join us as we share how our experiences with user-centered design, development principles–content first, semantic code, flexible APIs, adaptive design–and agile development methodologies have prepared us for the future.

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Future-Proof Your Career and Environment Through Diversity and Inclusion

Presenter: Florence D. Hudson

We all deal with being “different” at one time or another. Diversity is about accepting others that are not just like you. Diversity and inclusion are critical in developing the strongest teams, the most diversity of thought and the most insight and wisdom from various perspectives, built on a welcoming environment for everyone to thrive and grow in their own way.  We will discuss the facts about the diversity statistics regarding women in S-T-E-M, and how to build a more diverse and inclusive environment. Hudson will also share her personal journey: as an aerospace engineer, a woman in STEM and a leader, to inspire us all to build our own personal future and a better future for us all.

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Strategies for Future-Proofing Your Career: Developing and Growing 12 Essential Competencies

Presenters: Heidi Barta, Maureen Noonan, Jim Phelps

Looking five to 10 years forward, it is inevitable that your role and the industry you work in will be different, and yet it is impossible to know how our workplace and responsibilities will change in the future. One constant throughout these changes is the importance of your investment in professional competencies. This session will explore the 12 competencies of a world-class IT professional as compiled by the CEB IT Leadership Council. These skills and competencies are transferable and universally sought. We IT professionals should invest in the development of these competencies in order to withstand the changes, take advantage of new career opportunities and to remain in demand and valued. Join us for this dynamic workshop to analyze and discuss your professional competencies with your peers. You will gain a deeper understanding of ways to future-proof your career.

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Leadership Perspectives on Future-Proofing an IT Organization

Facilitators: Alisa Hata, Susan Lawrence

Panel: Jeffrey Balaz, Anja Canfield-Budde, Shane McDowell, Charles Wesley, Mick Westrick

Whether it is preparing constituents to adopt future technologies, conducting long-range planning and developing strategic plans, or influencing colleagues to work in new ways, leadership is critical at all levels of an organization and is foundational in preparing teams to be successful in the face of change. At this session we will share an overview of what IT leaders from across the UW have to say about future-proofing their organizations. We will also have a chance to hear from a panel of UW leaders who have been deliberately pursuing classroom learning and experiential growth on the topic of leadership through UW-IT’s Leadership Development Program. They will share their unique perspectives about what they are doing today to position their organization for success in the future.

Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Vikram Jandhyala, Vice Provost for Innovation, UW

Vikram Jandhyala is Vice Provost for Innovation at the University of Washington and professor in the department of electrical engineering. He is founding UW director of the UW-PNNL northwest institute for advanced computing (NIAC), and directs the applied computational engineering (ACE) lab in UW EE.

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Greg Miller, Professor and Department Chair

Greg Miller received his B.S.C.E. from the University of Washington in 1980, and then went on to earn his M.S.C.E. (1981) and Ph.D. (1983) degrees from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, returning to the University of Washington as a faculty member at the end of 1983. During his career he has had a number of local and national leadership roles, serving most recently as Associate Dean for Infrastructure and Computing for the College of Engineering prior to taking on the Civil and Environmental Engineering Chair position at the end of 2009.

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John Slattery, Vice Dean for Research and Graduate Education and Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine in the School of Medicine

John Slattery is Vice Dean for Research and Graduate Education and Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington. He served as Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the Graduate School of the University for 5 years and has been on the University faculty for approximately 30 years.

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Kelli Trosvig, Vice President for UW-IT, Chief Information Officer

Kelli, in her role as Vice President for UW-IT and CIO, is responsible for strategic oversight, planning and direction of the University’s information technology infrastructure, as well as resources and services. Under Kelli’s leadership, UW-IT launched key strategic initiatives to meet the needs of mobile faculty and students, and is leading the effort to enhance the student experience and is beginning major modernization efforts in administrative computing.

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Joe Shelley, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technologies and CIO at the University of Washington Bothell

Joe Shelley serves as the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Information Technologies and CIO at the University of Washington Bothell. His team provides central IT support for a branch campus of the University of Washington. UW Bothell is headed for about 5000 student FTE for Autumn 2014, opening a new science and technology building, and continuing to grow. The IT group is currently implementing new strategies for cloud sourcing (right-sourcing, really), online learning, business process improvement, mobile and more.

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General Speakers

Laura Baldwin
Laura is a Service Manager in Academic & Collaborative Applications (ACA) for University of Washington Information Technology. She has worked at the UW for over 20 years and currently manages Trumba calendars, Panopto lecture capture, SpaceScout, MailMan mailing lists, and Confluence Wiki.

Heidi Barta
Heidi is the Organizational Development Manager in UW-IT. She is responsible for providing consultation and program development in order to continuously improve organizations, retain staff, and assist supervisors. She provides management consulting and training and small and large group facilitation for various units. She began work at the UW in 1998 with an initial focus on student experiences and then transitioned into Human Resources and Organizational Development with a focus on staff.

Timothy Batzel
Tim is a Senior Computer Specialist in Classroom Technology & Events in UW-IT, Academic Services. He has 15 years of experience with classroom technology. Tim is a member of CTE’s classroom integration team which provides design, programming and integration of classroom technology in campus learning spaces.

Rupert Berk
Rupert is an Enterprise Solutions Architect in UW-IT, IT Services & Strategic Sourcing. He has been designing and building Web APIs to improve application integration since 2000, both at the UW and elsewhere.

Anja Canfield-Budde
Anja Canfield-Budde is the Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics at the University of Washington. She is responsible for the leadership and strategic direction across areas of enterprise information management, including data warehousing, business intelligence, metadata and information architecture. Before joining higher education in 2008, she worked at Microsoft for 9 years. Canfield-Budde is currently president of Higher Education Data Warehousing (HEDW), and co-chair of the Evanta Executive Summits.

Ben Cornell
Ben brings 15 years of experience to UW’s Office of Research Information Services (ORIS). Leveraging his background in software engineering and architecture, business analysis, system implementation and his experience with a wide-range of technologies, Ben is well versed in applying software to meet the needs of business. With a passion for delivering high-quality results when faced with difficult problems, he has improved operations at many large organizations by crafting innovative solutions and implementing transformative processes and systems.

David Cox
David is a Technology Manager in Computing Infrastructure Applications Engineering at UW-IT. He has worked for UW since 1991 in various roles. In his current role he manages the Managed Servers service, the High Performance Computing service, UW Email (Deskmail) services, the Backup and Archive service, and others.

Rick Ells
Rick is the Senior Webmaster for UW-IT Communications. Rick is a Web designer, graphics artist, instructor, and technical writer with over 30 years of experience at the UW. He keeps IT Connect fresh and vibrant and he leads the AccessibleWeb@U community of UW web designers, developers, and other interested individuals who discuss and share ideas on accessible web design. Rick is an avid photographer who especially enjoys outdoor photography.

Cara Giacomini
Cara is a Research Manager in UW-IT, Customer Services & Support.
She investigates the technology and support needs of UW’s faculty, researchers, students, and staff, providing data to help the university make informed decisions in these areas.

Brad Greer
Brad has been working in UW-IT for 25 years — a history thats includes a variety of stuff including: X terminals, UNIX servers, managed desktops, system security, system architecture, IT strategy, project management, and service management. Brad is currently the AVP for UW-IT Computing Infrastructure division, one of the sponsors for UW-IT’s ITSM/ITIL Program , and the current service owner for over 20 of UW-IT’s infrastructure services.

Scott Hansen
Scott is the Assistant Director of Servers and Storage for UW-IT. His primary role is providing enterprise-class managed server and storage solutions, public cloud, consulting and ongoing IT operational support. Prior to his past 10+ years at the UW, Scott held IT management roles at Coinstar Inc., and other Northwest technology companies.

Teresa Highsmith
Teresa is the CEB IT Leadership Council Associate Director for CEB IT Practice.

Troy Hogan
Troy is a Technical Project Manager for the Enterprise Data & Analytics unit of UW-IT. The EDA group is responsible for loading and managing the Enterprise Data Warehouse and the reports and analytics developed using EDW data.

Asraful Islam
Asraful started his position as Lead Software Engineer in July. He and his family are moving back to Seattle from Frisco, Texas, a Dallas suburb, where he worked for Sabre, Inc. While at Sabre he worked in all aspects of Software design and development. Prior to working there, he worked in various divisions at Microsoft on products such as Bing.com and Windows phone.​

Joe Kittleson
Joseph is the Executive Director of HR Information Systems as well as UW’s Solution Architect for the HR/Payroll Modernization project. Joseph has worked at the UW for over 12 years in project management, operational and IT roles. Prior to the UW, he ran a venture backed HR software company and worked in asset management for a regional investment bank.

Jennifer Lehner
Jennifer is an Institutional Analyst within the Graduate School, supporting data development and reporting on graduate education at the UW, including the strategic and tactical data needs of the Dean of the Graduate School. She reports to the Director of Computing and Information Resources and works closely with the Dean and Director of Communications to develop and analyze UW and peer institutional data to address issues in graduate education. Jennifer also serves as an expert on development of administrative metrics and graphical and other statistical presentations for inclusion in the Graduate School report series, grant proposals and other communications.

Tom Lewis
Tom directs Academic & Collaborative Applications (ACA) for University of Washington Information Technology. His team advances teaching, learning, and research by investigating computing trends, identifying user needs, crafting innovative applications, and integrating open source technologies, vendor solutions, and cloud services.

Fang Lin
Fang is a software engineer in Academic & Collaborative Applications (ACA) for UW-IT. She has worked on the MyUW enterprise portal project since 1999 and is still focusing on the development and support for MyUW and Campus Event Calendars.

Zephyr McLaughlin
Zephyr is an Information Assurance Architect in the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer. He has worked for UW since 1997. In his current role he is responsible for designing, coordinating, and implementing operational practices, services functions, and tools as needed to achieve UW’s information assurance program goals.

John Mobley
John is the Development Technology Manager in Enterprise Data & Analytics. John is ensuring his team’s systems, including the UW’s wildly popular ODS and EDW, are prepared for the coming HR/P changes. John is passionate about leveraging information resources to make the University even more fantastic than it already is. John’s 14 years at the UW include work in a variety of technical positions both in UW-IT and The Graduate School. His experience with academic, financial, HR, payroll, compliance, and research administration data allows him to connect the dots for campus partners and unlock new solutions.

Jacob Morris
Jacob is the Technology Manager for the HR/Payroll Modernization project, where he oversees the conversion, reports and integrations teams for the implementation of Workday, UW’s new integrated HR and payroll system. Prior to joining the project team, Jacob was the Director of Learning Technologies for UW-IT, which is responsible for supporting the technologies used in teaching and learning, including the central learning management and lecture capture systems and for managing the largest computer lab on campus. He has taught undergraduate courses focused on web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript since 2009 for the Information School. Jacob received both a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in information management from the University of Washington.

David Morton
David is the Director of Mobile Communications in UW-IT where he leads the development and implementation of wireless broadband and mobile technologies. Prior to joining the University of Washington, David lead the Wireless Broadband Engineering team for communications provider T-Mobile. While at T-Mobile his team built one of the United States’ largest WiFi data networks, and lead the development of other wireless broadband technologies. Morton’s other credits include serving as Principal Engineer and Vice President of Open Telecommunications and the development of one of the first broadband Voice over IP network providers.

Jason Myers
Jason brings over 10 years of technology experience in strategic planning, leadership and project management. He has successfully led development teams to an agile product development lifecycle while collaborating with stakeholders to meet expectations and deliverables; while keeping with the overall department vision. Jason continues to utilize the department vision to help support all decision making to strategically align with the core business objectives.

Currently, Jason focuses on the overall operations and strategic alignment of ORIS. He regularly pushes to improve the overall team performance, build collaboration and instill a sense of pride in all of ORIS.

Chris Naslund
With over 10 years of experience in IT operations and engineering, Chris takes a pragmatic approach to management and leadership. Driven by business needs, flexibility, and efficiency, he strives to develop the right solutions, the right way, and at the right time. In addition to the strategic and tactical management of IT operations that support the Office of Research, Chris has recently created a development operations (DevOps) program to support software development in ORIS. An approach that stresses communication, collaboration, and integration between development, test, and infrastructure engineers, DevOps is a response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. The primary goals of this program are to create efficient and flexible infrastructure, to ensure consistency between development, testing, and production environments, and to increase the rate of production releases. DevOps is driven by agile development practices, virtualization, and automation.​

Maureen Noonan
Maureen is an Organizational Development Specialist in UW-IT. Her team provides consultation and program development in order to continuously improve organizations, retain staff, and assist supervisors.. Maureen began work at the UW in 1996 as a Computer Operator, transitioned to being a Technology Manager, and earned her Master of Management degree from UW Bothell.

Cyndi O’Farrell
Cyndi is a Project Manager with UW Medicine IT Services Project Management Office. She has been with UW Medicine in this role for 3 years and is responsible for managing various projects for Enterprise Business Systems stakeholders primarily related to Epic health care software. Cyndi worked in IT for Weyerhaeuser Company for 25 years after graduating from the University of Washington. She performed many roles including programmer/analyst, team lead, Project Manager, and IT Manager supporting business functions including Mill Maintenance, Workers Compensation, Safety & Health, HR/Benefits (PeopleSoft), and Web & Content Services. Cyndi is currently managing the technical work stream for the Medical Center’s HR/P Readiness effort aligned to the larger HR/P Modernization program.

Jim Phelps
Jim is the Director of Enterprise Architecture & Strategy with the IT Services and Strategic Sourcing Division of UW-IT. He heads the Enterprise Architecture (EA) Steering Group that is responsible for setting EA strategy for the UW, as well as for defining the architectural criteria by which IT projects, services, and acquisitions are evaluated. Jim works with UW’s business and IT stakeholders to align business strategies and technology projects with each other and UW strategic directions. Jim comes from the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he was Enterprise Architect / Senior IT Architect for the Division of Information Technology.

Scott Preston
Scott is a professional emergency manager with the University of Washington’s Department of Emergency Management, serving as the University’s Business Continuity Manager and primary Duty Officer. Scott also serves in the University’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) as one of the Planning Section Chiefs. Scott has been in the career field of emergency management for 10 years.

Scott holds a Master of Arts in Emergency and Disaster Management as well as professional accreditation as a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM), a Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP) and as a Master Exercise Practitioner (MEP). Scott’s earliest recollection of being is a disaster is the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s while living in Kennewick, Washington.

When not at work, Scott volunteers his time with Snoqualmie Pass Fire and Rescue, the Seafair Emergency Management Group and the Seattle Incident Management Team, performing volunteer work in emergency response, incident planning and EMS. Scott’s family includes his wife, 4 children, 1 grandchild, a dog and 2 cats. Scott’s hobbies include throwing boomerangs, gaming with his family and reading.

Hadi Rangin
Hadi is an Information Technology Accessibility Specialist at the University of Washington Seattle campus and has over 25 years of experience in the area of accessibility. His primary job is to work with on-campus developers and content creators to produce more universally accessible and usable applications and content. He also works with various vendors on accessibility of their products and assists them in incorporating accessibility in their design, implementation, and quality assurance processes.

Hadi’s educational background is in Computer Science with a focus on Network Management and Human-Computer Interfaces. He is blind and has experienced accessibility as a student, faculty member, software developer, trainer, and most recently as an accessibility advocate with multiple hats.

Paul Schurr
Paul is the Technology Manager of the Enterprise Integration Platform. He has worked at the university for about 10 years and prior to that worked for Microsoft, AT&T, and a variety of start-ups. He teaches software engineering at UW Educational Outreach and in his spare time, coaches his children’s soccer teams and tutors middle and high school students in math and science.

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Jan Sullivan
Jan is a Technology Manager in UW-IT / Information Management currently working on the HR/Payroll – Intersections project. Jan has worked at the UW since 1984 with great teams who have implemented and supported Financial applications including JD Edwards (Grant Receivables), Ariba (eProcurement / eTravel), OASIS (Equipment Inventory), and long-lived mainframe systems such as PAS, FAS, and BGT.

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Jonathan Swanson
Jonathan is a developer for University Marketing and Communications and a former member of UW-IT / ACA. He develops and maintains the UW’s public-facing sites and runs the monthly Web Council. He also teaches web development at the iSchool.

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Andrew Tuttle
Andrew is an Analyst for the CEB IT Leadership Council.

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Pieter Visser
Pieter is a Technical Solution Architect in Enterprise Data & Analytics at UW-IT. He helps design and implement solutions for the Enterprise Data Warehouse and is passionate about delivering Business Intelligence and Meta data to the UW.

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Andy Ward
Andy is the Manager of the Technology Business Continuity unit in UW-IT. Andy has spent over 20 years leading and supporting business continuity, disaster recovery, and emergency management efforts within UW-IT and throughout campus. He co-chairs the UW Crisis Communications and UW Emergency Management Planning committees, and is a UW Emergency Operations Center responder.

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William Washington
William is a Technology Manager specializing under User Experience Design in UW-IT’s Academic Services, Academic & Collaborative Applications unit.

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Joshua Weiner
Josh is a Software Engineer in the Office of Research Information Services (ORIS).

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Ann Wunderlin
Ann is the Education and Communication Manager for the Enterprise Data & Analytics unit of UW-IT. The EDA group is responsible for loading and managing the Enterprise Data Warehouse and the reports and analytics developed using EDW data. Ann joined the team 11 years ago and through her roles of business analyst, business intelligence engineer and now education and communication, has been part of its growth from fledgling unit to a core strategic asset for UW-IT and the University.

Sessions

A BARC Plan Is Worth More Than A Byte: Business Continuity Planning at the UW
Presenters: Scott Preston, Andy Ward

How will your department recover from a disaster? What are your department’s critical business processes? How many staff know about your business continuity plan? This session is designed to help answer these questions and provide you with guidance about what you can do to create an effective business continuity plan and to ensure your department survives and thrives after a disaster. We will present a general overview of business continuity planning and best practices by looking at the enterprise business continuity support available at the UW, including UW Emergency Management’s Business, Academic, Research Continuity (BARC) Program and UW-IT’s Geographic Resiliency Program.

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Business Intelligence and Visualization – Driving Decision-Making with Data
Presenters: Cara Giacomini, Troy Hogan, Jennifer Lehner, Ann Wunderlin

The use of data visualization is exploding at UW. Over 30 groups are visualizing data to understand their businesses and drive decisions. Join us to hear from three of these groups:

• UW-IT examines help desk metrics to reduce call volume
• Enterprise Data & Analytics’ project management drives staff capacity planning
• The Graduate School gains insight into graduate student and postdoctoral activities

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Classroom and Collaboration Tools Roadmaps
Presenters: Timothy Batzel, Tom Lewis

Timothy Batzel will discuss the campus classroom technology refresh roadmap, which includes plans for a uniform user experience and standardized features in classrooms and private learning spaces, remote support and collection of metrics in classrooms, and a project to evaluate alternate teaching and learning configurations in a sandbox classroom. Tom Lewis will cover the 2 year roadmaps for more than a dozen collaboration tools and services, among them Catalyst Web Tools, Deskmail, GoogleApps, MediaAMP, MyUW, and Office365.

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Enterprise Architecture Panel
Presenters: Rupert Berk, Anja Canfield-Budde, Jim Phelps, James Renfro, Paul Schurr

EA links activities together to form a holistic response to change. Hear from the teams that are leading seven initiatives related to HR/P. See how their activities come together form a rich response HR/P and set the strategy and vision for Finance and other initiatives.

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Future of Networking – Trends/Mobile/Wireless
Presenter: David Morton

Technology has changed the way people think about how they connect to the outside world. SmartDevices barely existed 7 years ago, but today they account for almost two-thirds of the devices connecting to the UW Wi-Fi network. This session will look at where we are today, where we’re headed in the near term and ask some questions about where the road might lead in the future.

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Graph Databases in the Enterprise
Presenters: Rupert Berk, Zephyr McLaughlin, Pieter Visser

Hear how graph databases enable easier analysis of UW entities and their relationships. This session will cover graph basics, use cases at the UW where graph databases excel, and also limitations and challenges of graph.

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Incorporating Accessibility/Usability in Your Project Process
Presenters: Laura Baldwin, Rick Ells, Fang Lin, Hadi Rangin, Jan Sullivan, Jonathan Swanson, William Washington

A panel of web and application developers, who are implementing products ranging from locally developed to large-scale cloud-based services, will discuss usability and accessibility design methods that help ensure web-based services work for everyone. Following the panel, IT Accessibility Specialist Hadi Rangin will put some of the products to the test and demonstrate what he experiences as a blind person trying to navigate UW websites.

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Research Findings on the Future of IT Roles (presented via WebEx)
Presenters: Heidi Barta, Teresa Highsmith, Andrew Tuttle

None of us know what the IT discipline or organization will look like five years from now. But, we do know that things are shifting constantly and that roles in the IT field will evolve and additional skills may be required. The Account Representative and Analyst from CEB IT Leadership Council will be joining us virtually to present their findings about shifts on current IT roles and skills. They will discuss the emergence of new roles and skills and the relocation and transformation of traditional IT roles. This is talk will give you a glimpse at projected IT in the future of industry, as CEB’s research is not specific to higher education.

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Technologies and Solutions in Support of the Research Enterprise
Presenters: Ben Cornell, Asraful Islam, Jason Myers, Chris Naslund, Joshua Weiner

In this talk we will demonstrate how the Office of Research Information Services (ORIS) engaged in creating a strategic systems roadmap in support of business needs in the area of research administration at UW. Topics such as strategic alignment and identifying business capabilities within the research lifecycle roadmap will be discussed. This talk will have a strong focus on the technical aspects of the roadmap process; including infrastructure planning and design, and the use of new tools and technologies. There will be a variety of diagrams and demos used that will lead to ample time for questions and answers during the talk.

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Unconference- (bring your own topic)
Facilitator: Maureen Noonan

Join your colleagues for birds-of-a-feather conversations about subjects of interest to you. The agenda is created in the moment by the attendees at the beginning of the session. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion can put forth their topic and individuals decide which conversations to join. “Whoever comes are the right people and whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”

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UW-IT Cyber-Infrastructure
Presenters: Brad Greer

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is the coordinated aggregate of software, hardware, and expertise required to support current and future discoveries in science and engineering. Over the last five years UW-IT, in collaboration with the campus research computing community, has embraced this view of CI. This talk will focus on a description of the elements in the UW-IT supported CI, their integrations, use case examples, and future directions.

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UW-IT Server Services & Strategies
Presenters: David Cox, Scott Hansen

UW-IT’s Servers & Storage unit manages over 1,400 servers on site, remotely, and in the cloud. These servers provide business-critical applications, university-wide services, and departmental needs. Come join the conversation to see some of the behind the scenes architecture we use to keep these systems running, identify how you can leverage this infrastructure for your own needs, and learn what’s coming next. There will be time for discussion, so bring your questions.

Speakers, Sessions & Slides

Keynote

Bruce Vincent, Senior Technology Strategist and Director, Emerging Technologies, Stanford University
Video of opening keynote

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Sessions

Introduction to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Lori Clithero – Account Manager, Amazon Web Services

Learn about the layers of AWS that make up the entire platform stack, and hear examples of how AWS is currently being used in higher education.

Slides: Part 1 and Part 2

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Using Cloud-Based Analytics to Save Lives
Kristin Tolle – Director, Data Science Initiative, Microsoft Research Outreach

Weather predictions (based on ocean and atmospheric science) can be made granular by the availability of more data. Timely and precise predictions about natural disasters enabled by cloud computing and cyber-infrastructure can potentially prevent devastating loss. Machine learning can estimate data that is lost from sensors disabled by the disaster. More precise predictions are enabled by high-powered cloud-based computation where it is possible to run many different ensemble models in parallel. This talk will describe an end-to end cloud project that leverages Microsoft Azure, Azure Data Fabric and Azure Machine Learning to create a flood early warning system and make near-real time disaster prediction possible.

Slides: Part 1 and Part 2

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Automated Pathology Detection System Design using Medical Images: An Azure Machine Learning Research
Sohini Roy Chowdhury – Assistant Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Division of STEM, University of Washington-Bothell

I will present my work on using a Microsoft Azure ML-platform for generating a generalized flow for automated pathology detection using Medical Image data sets.

Slides

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Getting Started with Google Cloud Platform
Aja Hammerly – Cloud Developer Advocate, Google

Cloud Platform offers a wide range of compute, storage, and big data resources and all the bits you need to wire them together. In this presentation, we’ll give you an overview of the products and services that are available on Google Cloud Platform today and how they can support your research and cloud computing projects. This talk will cover Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Cloud Dataflow. Interested in running your projects on the same hardware that runs sites like YouTube, Google Search, and Google Analytics? Let us help you get started.

Slides

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Big Data Analytics on AWS
Rahul Pathak – Sr. Manager, Amazon EMR

Hear stories about how companies, researchers, startups, and universities are using AWS to process, analyze, visualize and share their big data.

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High Performance Computing on AWS: cfnCluster and Weather Research & Forecasting Model as Examples
Kevin Jorissen – Technical Business Development Manager, Amazon

The Weather Research & Forecasting Model (WRF) is widely used for weather and climate modeling in both research and commercial applications. AWS offers a performant environment for WRF simulations. We’ll show how to launch a high performance computing (HPC) cluster for WRF simulations on AWS in minutes.

Slides

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Python, Open Source and Other Aspects of Microsoft Azure for Data Science
Rob Fatland – Cloud Director, IT, University of Washington

For many researchers, the central challenge in cloud migration is a confusing array of new terminology and learning curves. I will therefore address jointly the related questions “What is possible on the Microsoft cloud?” and “What is the cost of getting there?” This talk presents elements of the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform as applied to data science challenges in academic research. Citing examples from collaborations with UW faculty–including Apache Spark and Spark SQL, Azure Machine Learning Studio, support for Python, event streaming and analytics, deployment of Virtual Machines and the relevant profusion of open source solutions–I will touch on a spectrum of services, tools and capabilities.

Slides

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Cloud Computing and Modeling Dynamic Competition in the U.S. Airline Industry
Carlos Andrew Manzanares – PhD candidate Department of Economics Vanderbilt University & Visiting PhD student, Department of Economics, University of Washington

Since 2005, the U.S. airline industry has experienced some of the most dramatic merger activity in its history, including mergers between major carriers. This activity has reduced the number of major carriers from eight to four, which has coincided with a dramatic reduction in the number of flights and a general increase in fares and fees. To study these changes, we model what would have happened if the U.S. Department of Justice had blocked these mergers, using a 10% sample of all airline tickets purchased in the United States since 1993. Absent cloud computing, this modeling task is challenging, to say the least. In this talk, I discuss how cloud computing, guided by the eScience Institute at the University of Washington and representatives from AWS, helped us overcome these challenges and dramatically increase the scale of scientific computing in economics in the process. I also describe how the process of collaborating with the eScience Institute and AWS further, including seeking additional advice and incorporating additional cloud computing tools, has enabled additional advancements in the project. Finally, I discuss the role of cloud computing in ongoing research.

Slides

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Azure for Education: Deploying Microsoft’s Cloud Platform at UW
Flora Muglia – Microsoft Solution Sales Professional, US Education, Azure

Microsoft Azure enables speed, scalability, and cost savings at universities across the country. This talk will cover several case studies on how universities have used Azure for research. It will also cover new cloud platform technologies that Microsoft is bringing to Azure. The goal of this talk is to provide ideas about how you can leverage Microsoft Azure at the University of Washington through research initiatives or datacenter modernization.

Slides

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Splunk in the Cloud: Getting IT and Research Value out of Unstructured Data Across Multiple Technology Silos in Your Organization (Without Having to Learn Hadoop)

Rob Reed – Worldwide Education Evangelist, Splunk

Sometimes technology can make life easier. In this talk, I will cover the basics of the big data analytics tool called Splunk Cloud, and talk about ways it is being used to further research and learning in academic settings.

Slides

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Azure Security and Compliance
Devendra Tiwari – Principal, Program Manager, Microsoft

Microsoft Azure is a leader in cloud security and compliance standards. Security is top of mind for many universities, and this talk will focus on the steps Microsoft takes to ensure that cloud data is secure – from compliance to privacy to transparency.

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Building Babel: Large Scale Data Collection in the Cloud
Ian Wesley-Smith, PhD Student, UW Seattle Information School

In this talk I will describe how we used AWS resources to build Babel (http://babel.eigenfactor.org), a web application providing scholarly article recommendations as a service. Babel allows us to run web scale experiments with different recommenders. It is designed to collect user feedback to help judge the efficacy of those recommenders. If you want to find out how to quickly and easily build REST APIs to support your experiment, or just hear about our experience using AWS for large scale data collection this is the talk for you!

Slides

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Intro to Amazon EC2
Curtis Bray, Solutions Architect Manager, Amazon

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Come learn how we’ve designed instance types to match your workloads and how to build security and network access into your cloud architecture. We’ll also discuss different purchasing options to optimize cost and to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

Slides

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Campus Enterprise and Academic Services into the Cloud – UW Bothell
Jim DeRoest – Manager, IT Operations, UW Bothell

We’re piloting projects in Azure and AWS that include enterprise applications, CMS, storage and labs. We’ll discuss general migration strategy and hurdles we encountered thus far.

Slides

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Amazon Web Services and Azure in Teaching
Magdalena Balazinska – Associate Professor, UW Seattle Computer Science and Engineering

In this talk, we will present our experience using Amazon Web Service and SQL Azure when teaching data management systems at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Slides

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Secure By Design – Running Compliant Workloads on AWS
Tim Sandage – Senior Risk & Compliance Strategist, Amazon

This session will focus on “Secure by Design” principles and show how an AWS environment can be configured to provide a reliable operational security control capability across multiple industry verticals (e.g. HIPAA, FISMA, PCI, etc.) to include:

• Organizational governance
• Asset inventory and control
• Logical access controls
• Operating system configuration
• Database security
• Applications security configurations

Slides

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Compliance and Security Considerations for Today’s End-User and Core Computing Environments
Eric Ludwig – Cloud Client Executive, CDWG

In this talk I will discuss best practices for securing sensitive data in cloud environments, examine various compliance adherences across cloud providers (ITAR, HIPAA, etc.) and will address data sovereignty.

Slides

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AWS Storage Solutions and Research Data Management on the Cloud
Jed Sundwall – AWS Open Data Technical Business Development Manager, Amazon

Managing large data sets can be a challenge, and even more so when you need to share large data sets with collaborators. This presentation will share lessons learned from large-scale data sharing experiments on AWS, including Landsat on AWS and the 3,000 Rice Genome project.

Slides