9:30
Welcome
- Craig Warren, Chair, Victorian University Directors of IT (VDIT) Victorian University Directors of IT (VDIT)
9:40
Opening Address
- Dr Joseph Lawrence, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Enterprise), Federation University Australia Federation University Australia
10:00
Keynote
- Dayle Stevens, Chief Data Officer, AGL Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion AGL Leadership, Diversity and Inclusion
Dayle will share how, as a CIO, she faces into diversity & inclusion, how she puts it to work & the simple action that anyone can take to do the same.
10:45
Morning Tea
11:00
11:50
VDIT - Communities of Practice Top 5 Issues and Outcomes
Business Intelligence/Knowledge Management
- Linda Tran and Sumer Nasrawi, Monash University Monash University
- Jeremy Egan, Federation University Federation University
Linda Tran and Sumer Nasrawi
‘Knowledge is Good’ – a Journey in Self Help & Adoption
In today’s connected world, customers, employees – virtually everyone – wants and expects fast, easy access to accurate information. In most cases, that data is locked away in various databases, files and minds within an organisation. If the data could be organised into a knowledge base, this opens the door to improved customer service, greater productivity, and less time spent answering the same questions. Recognising this, Monash University embarked on a journey to establish a knowledge and self-help capability within its IT division to optimise operations and enable its staff and students to get IT jobs done faster, anywhere, anytime.
In this session, Linda and Sumer will share the highlights – as well as the challenges – experienced as part of this journey.
Jeremy Egan, Federation University
Data! Data! Data! It is predominant in modern business and everybody’s doing something with it. Buzzwords are rife: Data and Analytics, BI, AI, Augmented Intelligence, Blockchain; the list goes on. But how do we ensure that we are deriving business value from data capture and data science activities? How do we ensure that we are aligned to the business and their needs and that our data outputs are appropriate and placed in the right hands?
We will take a look at the role of data governance to assist and guide our data activities to provide information and insight to the decision makers and action takers of the institution. Additionally we will discuss some of the technicalities of leveraging advanced analytics techniques.
12:30
Lunch
1:30
Keynote - Designing Collaborations: Working across disciplines and boundaries to create human-centred wearables, experiences and opportunities
Keynote - Designing Collaborations: Working across disciplines and boundaries to create human-centred wearables, experiences and opportunities
Leah will discuss her unique approach to collaborating across design, engineering and science to develop wearable technologies, services and experiences. Leah’s projects are distinctive in the field of wearable technologies for their precious forms – her intent is to shift the aesthetics of technology from the medical to the personal in order to increase uptake and compliance. She will share the iterative design process for some of her collaborative projects, which include jewellery to administer insulin via nano-engineered patches; a wearable to monitor loneliness; emergency jewellery; a cardiac monitor necklace; and Facett, the world’s first self-fit modular hearing aid that Leah designed for Blamey Saunders hears. Through these projects she has developed many human-centred design strategies to strengthen collaboration across disciplines and to understand the human experience of technology. Leah will discuss these approaches and share her insights around translation of technology into human impact through human centred design processes. Leah will also discuss her role as Co-Director of the RMIT Wearables and Sensing Network, which brings together 50 world-leading researchers from across 9 University Schools. Through this work she is actively pioneering the use of co-design methodologies to bridge disciplinary boundaries, map capabilities and foster collaboration.
2:15
Alternate Teaching Model
- Sue Owen, Director, Library and Learning Spaces Federation University Federation University
As a multi-campus university offering on-campus and a range of Blended Online and Digital (BOLD) learning opportunities, Federation University Australia is addressing the need for students, regardless of their location, to have a rich learning experience with access to the best academic staff in their discipline and close connection with colleagues in other places. Learning opportunities are being optimised through re-imagined curriculum and course teams mastering new approaches. Technologies are being introduced to ‘bridge’ the geographic distance between campuses (Horsham / Ballarat/ Berwick / Churchill / Brisbane). Student spaces are being developed to enable near-and-far collaboration, active learning and immersive classroom experiences. Through the courses, skills, technologies and spaces, online students and small on-campus classes will synchronously connect and share similar learning experiences, asking questions, commenting and discussing as if they are co-located in the one room. Preparations for a pilot in 2020 are underway, with courses from each School identified for participation. The expertise of enthusiastic staff in Schools, IT Services, Facilities Services, the Centre for Learning Innovation and Professional Practice, Library Services and members of the Student Senate are all contributing to the Alternative Teaching Model trial, with the purpose of improving student satisfaction, learning engagement, graduate success and university sustainability – and informing the University’s future development.
2:45
Panel Session - Internet of Things - Smart Cities
3:30
Afternoon Tea
3:45
Responding to the needs of Researchers
- Stuart Thornton, RMIT University RMIT University
- Michael Filippidis, LaTrobe University LaTrobe University
Stuart Thornton
The RMIT Storage Transformation
RMIT continues to evolve its storage capabilities to better suit the changing needs of Student, Staff and Researchers. From silos to cohesive enterprise platform and the next phase of research data management Stuart will paint the picture of then, now and a glimpse into the future.
Michael Filippidis
In this presentation, we would like to present the solution design of the Shazam architecture and demonstrate the approach deployed by La Trobe University. We will also explain how the system is helping researchers at La Trobe university to efficiently teleport their data without a hands-on approach. We will also present a brief overview of the roadmap for Shazam that would outline how LTU envisage Shazam to contribute to the broader Research Systems landscape within the university.
La Trobe University (LTU) researchers from both the SHE1 and ASSC2 colleges across a number of research disciplines are using internal and external instruments to capture large quantities of research data as part of their ongoing research. The movement of the captured data from the instruments to analysis environments was a manual, ad-hoc, error prone and time consuming process for the researchers. Whilst Information Services provides research network drives to researchers, these do not scale well for the larger datasets being generated by the instruments in question, resulting in researchers using their own data storage solutions leading to data security and retention issues, and difficulties for the researcher to share the data with their collaborators, particularly with those external to the university. In addition, the researchers have separate and distinct analysis environments, which are difficult for ICT to support.
La Trobe University got together with Intersect Australia to develop a cloud-based data capture and storage solution that addresses these issues and increases researcher efficiency. Intersect, in consultation with LTU, developed Shazam as a key automated research data pipeline solution. Shazam is an automated research data capture design pattern along with a visualisation and analytical toolkit created by Intersect to implement a robust, fault-tolerant data management, storage and processing solution for research projects generating huge (terabytes) amounts of research data. Shazam client components runs within LTU infrastructure, while server and analytical hub components are based within the Intersect Space/Time cloud.
The first Shazam client was installed within the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science (LIMS). Over Christmas, it began acquiring over 15TB of molecular data in the form of thousands of files from many external USB disks consisting of historical data from the Australian and international Synchrotrons, plus various X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) sources; every last byte of data was captured, safely transmitted via the Internet, validated for assurance, and stored. This data is now held securely in Intersect Space, and available as needed to an analytics system hosted in the Intersect Time platform. Because the data is directly
related to observations, batches and experiments – not just filesystems – and because Shazam automates so many tedious manual processes and points where errors could be introduced, we call this “data teleporting”.
Connectivity
- Balaji Naidu, RMIT University RMIT University
ICT Infrastructure and Internet connectivity allows the learners and teachers the opportunity to adopt the 21st century learning-teaching methods, promoting the shift from content based learning to inquiry and project based learning. For education institutions to be relevant in the 21st century; learning, teaching and working need to be collaborative. Connectivity is a vehicle for a global collaboration and at RMIT we are adopting ICT in a way that forge connections beyond the immediate classroom environments. By doing this RMIT is able to bring rich global, cultural and life changing experiences to our students and staff.
Mindfulness and its impact
- SK Cheng, University of Melbourne University of Melbourne
Mindfulness has gained popularity especially in the IT profession. Companies such as Google, Salesforce and SAP actively promote Mindfulness. There is a mindfulness room at every floor in Salesforce’s new headquarter. According to its CEO, Marc Benioff, “Mindfulness is a practice we need to embrace, and we cannot be afraid to follow this path.” In SAP, there is a designation of Chief Mindfulness Officer. Both SAP and Google actively promote “Search Inside Yourself”, a mindfulness course which incidentally is the most popular course within Google. SK attended the both the basic and advanced versions of “Search Inside Yourself“. He would like to share what he learnt about Mindfulness with you.
4:30
Close
4:30
BBQ and Drinks