An assessment by ITS Security found RCS ShareFile to be operating within the acceptable risk tolerance as defined in the University鈥檚 Risk Management Framework. Based on this, the 杏吧原创 Research Ethics Boards have deemed this an acceptable platform for research data.

For more information and to get started, please visit Research Computing Services (RCS).

Initiatives Completed

Over the past two years, ITS and OVPRI have collaborated to deliver on the following initiatives:

• Andrew Schoenrock accepted the position of Manager, Research Computing Services (RCS) in October 2019. Andrew is an accomplished researcher and joins 杏吧原创 after working at Health Canada in the Genomics and Genetic Toxicology group. Prior to that, he worked at 杏吧原创 in a variety of roles and in a wide range of interdisciplinary and collaborative research areas such as computer science, bioinformatics, computational biology and big data.

Andrew and the RCS team provide researchers with a single point of contact for all of their IT requirements. If you require research-related IT support, please contact either Andrew or Research Computing Services.

• 杏吧原创 has acquired new university-wide licenses for the IBM SPSS software, NVivo Plus, and Qualtrics Research Core. All are now administered by ITS and available to all faculty, staff and students, free of charge.
• The MATLAB software (with its many available tool boxes), that is funded by the Faculty of Engineering and Design (FED) and administered by ITS, is available to all faculty, staff and students, free of charge. ITS will start funding this software when its subscription is renewed in November 2020.
• A new research website () was launched in July 2019 aimed at better showcasing 杏吧原创鈥檚 research strengths.

Initiatives in Progress

The following initiatives are currently in development:

• There are now over 600 TB of data storage available to researchers, free of charge. This storage is backed-up and replicated between both of 杏吧原创鈥檚 secure data centers. The Citrix Sharefile software required for researchers to facilitate collaborative file sharing that is web based and accessible to both 杏吧原创 and non-杏吧原创 researchers, will be available in the summer.
• A new Research Project Approval form has been developed and is currently being piloted by researchers. This simplified form provides a better user experience for submitters and will replace the checklist that currently resides in the cuResearch (ROMEO) website.
• Through a CANARIE funded project, researchers can work with the Research Software Development Team to create purpose-built applications that meet their specific project requirements.

Future Initiatives

The following initiatives are being planned:

• An extensive review of the Research Administration Lifecycle is nearing completion that will lead to recommendations on how to streamline processes and integrate/simplify the information systems that are presently used by Departments, Faculties, CORIS, IPS, Ethics, HR Payroll, FGPA and Research Accounting Services.
• Research Computing Services will continue to act as the single point of contact for all research-related IT support and will further expand and strengthen the types of support offered.

These Initiatives are Supported In Part by the Federal Research Support Fund (RSF) and its Incremental Project Grants (IPG)

The is a Tri-Agency initiative which assists Canadian postsecondary institutions with the expenses associated with managing the research funded by Canada’s research granting agencies.

The generous contributions of the RSF and its IPG stream are paramount to the success of strategic investments like those listed above.

Sylvain joined the ITS team in 2014 to develop and lead the Research Computing Services (RCS) team providing researchers with the support, expertise and resources necessary to conduct research computing at 杏吧原创. His passion and dedication inspired his team to achieve many successes under his leadership. He took great joy in assisting researchers to optimize code so it took only days, rather than months, to complete.聽

Although he was only in ITS a short time, Sylvain made a significant impact. He developed a solid team that was responsible for providing a single point of contact for research-related requests to ITS. He was pleased to offer access to open and commercial software through the Research Computing and Development Cloud (RCDC), and to support the joint Data Science program through participation in the design, measurement, collection, sampling and statistical analysis of research data and results.

Sylvain became part of the 杏吧原创 community in 2002 and was a proud alumnus who loved the university. He completed a Master of Computer Science in 2003 and a PhD in 2010 on parallel algorithms for protein interaction prediction, supervised by Dr. Frank Dehne.聽His graduate studies in the School of Computer Science included being a contract instructor, teaching assistant, and a research assistant.

He continued as a postdoctoral fellow with research on high performance computing for protein analytics and computational weld mechanics. He was also a leading member of the bioinformatics research group and a prolific researcher who was widely published.

His post-secondary studies began at the Universit茅 de Moncton where he earned a Bachelor of Applied Computer Science (B.A.C.S), in May 2001.

Sylvain鈥檚 enthusiasm for his technological interests sparked many fascinating discussions with his peers. He spread his collaborative approach to research across the campus and will be remembered for his kind and friendly demeanour.

Our hearts go out to Sylvain鈥檚 spouse Melanie and the entire Pitre family. His family wanted the 杏吧原创 community to know that Sylvain鈥檚 kidneys and lungs were donated and, as a result, three lives were saved with this significant act of kindness. He was a valued colleague, teacher and mentor, and he will be deeply missed.

A funeral will be held for Sylvain in Nigadoo, New Brunswick. The details are still being finalized.

We have just released our聽2018 Year in Review. This report highlights some of our achievements in key areas, including:

• Supporting teaching and learning with CU-wireless enhancements and the launch of a new Academic Status Report.
• Supporting research with OVPRI collaborations and the services offered by our Research Computing Services team.
• Protecting university assets with two-factor authentication and data centre enhancements.
• Providing interactive platforms with the launch of the Marketplace and the new FutureFunder website.

Read more about these initiatives in our 2018 Year in Review.

We are proud of what we have achieved in the past year聽and the many collaborations we have across campus.

Wishing you the best in 2019!

New Software Licensing Agreements

杏吧原创 has acquired new university-wide licenses for the IBM聽SPSS聽software and NVivo Plus. Both are now available to all faculty, staff and students, free of charge.

• The IBM SPSS聽software is available for download at聽 (My杏吧原创One login required). Please ensure that you have enough disk space on your device/computer to install this software, as it is quite large, (up to 2GB).聽聽 For more information on disk space requirements, visit聽.
• The NVivo Plus software is available for download at (My杏吧原创One login required).

Qualtrics Research Core software has been added to this initiative.聽 It will also be free of charge for all faculty, staff, and students.

These licenses are in addition to the software packages already available free of charge for faculty, staff, and students (MATLAB, Trend Micro, MS-Office 365, STATA, and more). Visit our Site-Licensed Software webpage for the full list of software packages available.

Increased secure data storage capacity

ITS and OVPRI will be increasing the current secure data storage capacity for researchers from 60 TB to over 400 TB.聽 This storage is backed-up, replicated and stored in 杏吧原创鈥檚 secure data centers.

Along with this increased capacity, researchers will have the capability to share their data with delegated users.

Research Computing Services

Research Computing Services (RCS)聽personnel support and assist researchers in using Advanced Research Computing (ARC) and High-Performance resources available on- and off-campus. This support includes tutorials, training, workshops as well as assistance with porting and optimizing existing code.

If you require research-related IT support, please contact Research Computing Services. All other IT service requests can go through the ITS Service Desk.

The age of driverless vehicles is quickly moving from futuristic dream to present-day reality. This month鈥檚 Spotlight is all about autonomous vehicles and making smarter cars.

What is an autonomous vehicle?

Automation levels

There are five different levels of driving automation. At Level 1, the vehicle assists with some functions. This could be a car system that issues warnings or brakes a little for you when too close to another vehicle. At the other extreme is Level 5 (鈥渟teering wheel optional鈥�). No human intervention is required for driving 鈥� for example, a robotic taxi.

Today鈥檚 Spotlight focuses on Level 5 鈥� autonomous vehicles that are capable of navigating the environment without human input. These are also known as self-driving, driverless or robotic cars.

Navigating without a human

Autonomous vehicles detect their surroundings in several different ways including, radar, laser light, motion sensors, GPS and computer vision. Control systems analyze sensory data to 鈥渟ee鈥� other cars and distinguish obstacles on the road. This enables driverless cars to make sense of their current environment. company to test a prototype of an autonomous vehicle.

What makes self-driving cars feasible now?

Several advances in technology make self-driving cars a current reality.

Machine learning
Autonomous vehicles use machine-learning algorithms to create models that detect obstacles and make predictions. The goal is systems that perceive and act from data. For example, self-driving cars learn to avoid other cars by analyzing video frames from an onboard camera.

Internet of Things
The Internet of Things connects everyday objects through embedded computer devices and the Internet. In the case of self driving cars, it has been described as a that is dynamic and continuously being updated. For example, smart cars can register and share real-time traffic alerts.

Cloud computing
Using the cloud, smart cars can access data and communicate with each other to avoid accidents, download maps, get up-to-day traffic information and determine the best route to get somewhere.

Data availability & analysis
There is more and more data at our disposal both in quantity and variety. Data storage is also becoming more affordable. Computational processing is getting cheaper and more powerful. This makes it possible to analyze complex data quickly and accurately.

杏吧原创鈥檚 Research Computing Cloud
At 杏吧原创, researchers who need high performance computing resources have access to the Research Computing and Development Cloud.

The Good and the Bad

Driverless car technology can be scary but it鈥檚 hard to deny the benefits. Here is a quick overview of some of the potential pros and cons.

Pros

Fewer accidents
are due to human error. Compared to the behaviours we exhibit behind the wheel (speeding, distracted driving, disobeying laws) a computer is the ideal motorist. For example, autonomous vehicles use a complicated algorithm to determine safe stopping and driving distance. Decisions are not subject to mental state as is the case with humans!

Greener
A steadier speed would mean less fuel consumption. It is likely a car sharing model would evolve which would mean fewer cars on the road and less traffic congestion.

Accessibility
Driverless cars could offer more freedom to some populations (e.g., elderly and persons with disabilities) who may not be able to drive.

Safely multitask
Human passengers can use commute time for things other than driving such as, reading, working, talking or even sleeping.

Boost to economy
Driverless tech could

Cons

Job loss
The need for fewer professional drivers (e.g., taxi and truck drivers) would impact the economy and unemployment rate.

Expensive
Owning a self-driving car will likely be quite expensive. There will also be a substantial cost associated with building infrastructure and roads that are friendly to autonomous vehicles.

Technology can fail
There is always the potential for unexpected glitches when it comes to tech and programming. Even if it seems flawless at first, an update with faulty code could cause errors that lead to accidents. Environmental factors (e.g., heavy rain, snow) can affect the onboard instruments that gather data to analyze driving conditions.

Ethical issues
Who is at fault in the event of an accident 鈥� the manufacturer of the vehicle, the software developer? There has already been one case where a Or who dies when the car is forced into a no-win situation? For example, should a self-driving car swerve into traffic, possibly killing its passengers and others, in order to avoid hitting a child who runs out onto the road?

Privacy and security
Just about every computing device can be hacked. This includes systems in driverless cars. Information could be accessed and exploited. Imagine if someone remotely accessed and took control of a driverless vehicle.

Autonomous Vehicle Research at 杏吧原创

杏吧原创 University is actively involved in autonomous vehicle technology, with over 125 researchers from four faculties and 13 university departments, schools and institutes engaged in research.

Research areas include: autonomous operations, data processing and management, sensor network technologies, wireless connectivity, cybersecurity, software engineering, and road and vehicle safety. Find out more at 杏吧原创鈥檚 Autonomous Vehicles website.

Recently, 杏吧原创 students held a demonstration of the technology behind connected and autonomous vehicles. Organized by Professor Richard Yu, the event demonstrated the university鈥檚 contribution in the R&D of autonomous vehicles (view full story). This past Fall, Professor Yu was awarded $974,000 from the Canadian Safety and Security Program to help enhance the cybersecurity of autonomous vehicles.

5 Things we Thought you Should

1. Online training with
Looking to upgrade or polish your skills? All 杏吧原创 staff have ongoing, free access to . This website is a great learning resource with instructional videos in areas from software and programming, to business skills. For more information, visit Learning and Development.

2. Hardware Services recycles
Did you know that in 2017, the folks in Hardware Services recycled 16,505 kg of hardware? That鈥檚 the equivalent of 11 average sized cars! Recycled items included display devices, desktop and laptop computers, computer peripherals, and printers.This recycling program provides environmentally friendly and secure disposal of E-Waste free of charge. Campus community members can drop off their e-waste at 1251 Herzberg, between 9.00 am 鈥� 3.30pm.

3. Athletics website gets a makeover
Web Services collaborated with the folks in Athletics to get their up and running. The site is built on the new 杏吧原创 Framework which allows for more design choices and customization while still being both accessible and mobile-friendly. See the new site in action at and while you are there!

4. The 杏吧原创 Marketplace is live
After an extensive pilot, the Marketplace is now live and open to all Faculty and Staff to buy and sell their goods. You will find a link to the Marketplace in the lefthand navigation menu of the intranet dashboard or go directly to:

5. Free antivirus software available for all faculty and staff
Antivirus software from Trend Micro is available for free to all faculty and staff for home use. Licenses are good for one year, after which time they expire. This year鈥檚 download is now available at:

The first, MyDesktop, enables easy access to course-related software from personal devices in any enabled classroom. This service can be used as a consistent environment for teaching without the need to purchase, install or configure individual applications. Faculty can now engage students in the classroom with more interactive content without the restrictions of a traditional computer lab environment.

The second service, the Research Computing and Development Cloud (or RCDC), offers computing resources and user support to researchers on campus. It provides researchers a platform to develop their own applications or to have access to computing power beyond their office workstation. Researchers are able to process more data, ask larger questions and get results quicker.

By collaborating with the community and identifying key concerns with available services, we implemented these state-of-the-art tools to lead 杏吧原创鈥檚 advancement of learning and research excellence.

They were working with 350GB of input data and predicted that processing it was going to take 70 days.聽 In addition, the existing multi-step workflow required a lot of user intervention between steps (manually editing, copying, moving files and folders), which they were hoping to automate.

After reviewing the researchers鈥� code, the rewrote large sections to improve efficiency of the file reading and writing. This reduced runtime from 2.5 days to 1 hour for the first two steps.聽 They were able to split the code up into several parts and have it run simultaneously in parallel.聽 This is where they noticed most of the speed improvements.

Instead of manual user intervention, they automated most the tasks between the steps of the process using scripts. This allowed the researchers to run most of the process automatically.

The expected runtime of 70 days was dropped to a real runtime of 2 days for an overall performance improvement of 35x using one of the Research Computing Cloud nodes.

鈥淚 am really impressed and happy with the performance results and that weeks of work dropped to days鈥�, said Wallace.

work with faculty members to understand their research computing needs and provide the support or computing resources they require.

What is it that your team does?

The three of us, Andrew, Blake and I, help faculty and students who are working on projects with advanced research computing needs. 聽 These projects generally involve big data, large聽computational power or modelling that cannot be handled by standard computing infrastructure.

We work with these faculty members to understand their research computing needs and provide the support or computing resources they require.

There are so many new opportunities in big data, particularly for the non-technical departments. At 聽researchers聽from Public Policy and Administration, History, Journalism and Health Sciences spoke to developments, needs and opportunities for Big Data in their departments.

Our services are聽available to any researcher, in any department, who is in need of high computing resources.

What kind of support do you provide?

We offer a number of different support services depending on the individuals needs.

Code

We鈥檝e assisted with the porting, optimization and running of code and applications.

For example, a researcher from the Economics department is using big data to conduct time series analysis. We helped him by looking at the code he was running and tweaked it to run faster.聽 This helped him to focus more on his research and less on the necessary, but often time intensive, computing processes behind analyzing the research.

Another researcher in Biology is looking at genetics of adaptations.聽 He and his student were working with some Open Source code and needed help writing code around it in order to reduce run time.聽 What would have taken six months on a laptop now takes three days using a cluster.聽 Because they need to re-run the code on a regular basis, they can now get the results they need to do their analysis faster.

Grant Proposals

We鈥檝e helped faculty with grant proposals by contributing sections that describe the interplay between their research and advanced research computing聽resources. Granting agencies, like , want to know what resources the university provides and they will then often match it.聽 We help researchers with the details in describing the resources and big data tools that 杏吧原创 provides.

Workshops

In addition, we host and offer a number of workshops on working with big data. We recently hosted . This workshop focused on business analytics to discover insights to: recruitment, enrolment, financial aid, institutional research, student experience, student retention, res life, diversity, facilities, campus safety, and more

Classroom Support

We鈥檙e also providing the DATA-5000 class (in the ) support with access to 杏吧原创鈥檚 Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software.

This is an interesting program in that it brings together students from science, engineering, arts, social science, public affairs and Sprott.聽 They sign up for a masters degree in one of these departments and then they add a specialization in data science.聽聽 This year the program had 40 students (double than last year) 鈥� 20 from the technical programs, 20 from the non-technical.

What kind of computing resources do you offer to researchers?

Right now we offer access to open and commercial software through the VCL. 聽Software packages available include IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, IBM SPSS Statistics, MathWorks鈥� Matlab, Stata/SE 13, MPICH and Hadoop.

These services are available at no cost to researchers in all faculties at 杏吧原创.

Additional Computing Resources

There are currently a number of specialized computing resources on campus – , Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Computing Cluster, 聽, 聽and .

We offer computing resources for researchers who do not require or are not eligible to use these specialized services.

For researchers working with big data requiring national level support, is a great resource.聽 To be able to use these resources, researchers much submit a proposal (with which we鈥檙e happy to help), but the reality is that researchers are getting on average 64% of their requested resources.聽 This leaves some researchers who are in the middle 鈥� needing more than a laptop but not as much as Compute Canada offers 鈥� to fend for themselves.

Our goal is not to discourage researchers from using Compute Canada, but to offer something in between.聽 Which is why we鈥檙e creating a Research Computing Cluster.

Tell me more about the Research Computing Cluster.

We鈥檙e working on opening a new research computing cluster here in ITS in late spring 2016. 聽It鈥檚 funded by the Faculty of Science, Faculty of Engineering and Design and ITS and the goal is to support researchers from across campus.

There are so many new opportunities in big data for the non-technical departments, for example, mining social media data in Journalism.聽 This computing cluster will be available to any researcher who is in need of high computing resources.

It will be an OpenStack-based cloud solution with 160 IBM Power8 compute cores, 192 Intel, Xeon compute cores for a total of 1.8TB storage (128GB per node) and 60 TB all-flash storage (SSD).聽 A modern laptop might have 4 cores.聽 There are 352 total in the cluster.

What do you see in the future for research computing?

We plan to continue to grow our client base and offer services to researchers who would are looking for compute and storage resources on campus. We want to be the first point of contact for any researcher on campus looking for these services and find them what they need, on or off-campus.

Working close with researchers and discussing their requirements helps us determine services that are not currently within our scope but that could be opportunities in the future.

For more information about the services that Sylvain and his team provide, visit the .