Home / Canadian Research Software Conference 2022

Registration

Travel

Call for Presentations

Call for posters

covid-19 precautions

Who should attend?

Active developers of research software (regardless of job title)
Computational researchers
Students with an interest in computational research
Developers of open-source software to support research
Researchers with an interest in software development

Why should you attend?

To learn, collaborate, exchange ideas, and discuss common issues affecting software development for academic research
To further build a cohesive Canadian community of academic research software developers
To strengthen the impact of public funds for research

Highlights from the last Canadian Research Software Conference…

The Canadian Research Software Conference in 2 Minutes:

SEE MORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM 2021!

How can you contribute?

There are three ways to contribute:

Short Talks: 15 minutes plus 5 minutes for Q&A
5-minute Lightning Talks: Share your ideas with the group quickly through a super short talk (perfect for new presenters)
Poster Competition: The top three entries, chosen by conference attendees, will receive prizes.

Call for Presentations

Research software developers, computational researchers, and students are invited to submit proposals for presentations.

Topics should:

concentrate on the software, rather than the research
discuss software engineering techniques, describe how you used software to solve a research problem, or used software on non-traditional devices (like mobile, sensors, or drones) to support research
focus on non-technical issues surrounding research software development, like managing a research software project/team, working with non-technical disciplines, or keeping up with new technologies

Proposals for both Short Talks and Lightning Talks are welcome from both individuals and groups. All those selected to speak at the conference will receive complimentary registration. Slides must be in widescreen PowerPoint or PDF format.

Key Dates:

Slides due to conference organizers (Julie Bortolotti) – 5 p.m. ET | May 24, 2022

Call for Presentations is now closed.

Call for Posters

Topics for posters may include discussions of your current project or other topics related to the development of software for academic research that you wish to discuss with conference attendees. Posters will be on display during both days of the conference, with poster sessions during coffee and lunch breaks.

All conference attendees will vote on the posters, with prizes awarded during the closing remarks at the end of day on June 1.

Prizes

1^st Place: $500 Amazon.ca Gift Card

2^nd Place: $350 Amazon.ca Gift Card

3^rd Place: $150 Amazon.ca Gift Card

Please note: For those selected, posters should be legible from a distance of 1 metre and must not be larger than 0.9m x 1.2m (3ft x 4ft).

The Call for Posters is now closed.

Registration

All fees are in CAD and are subject to HST.

$199

Registration – In-person

$49

Registration – Virtual

COVID-19 Precautions

For many of us, this will be the first time we are returning to travel to attend an in-person conference. Everyone’s comfort levels are different, and our planning team is working hard to make the event feel comfortable and safe for all attendees.

The venue’s protocols will depend on Quebec’s public health guidelines at the time of the conference. Additionally, we will take a few steps for the comfort and added safety of our staff and attendees:

Vaccination (two doses) is mandatory for all attendees. Upon check-in, all attendees’ vaccination status will be verified, along with government-issued photo ID.
All hotel staff who are serving meals and/or clearing our conference space will wear a mask.
Masks are mandatory for all attendees throughout the entire conference, except while eating, drinking, or presenting.
Buffets during breakfast, breaks, and lunch will be served by hotel staff.

Program

Please note that the program has changed – talks are now 15 minutes earlier in the morning on both days.

Check back often for Program updates.

Please note: the Canadian Research Software Conference will be conducted in English. Simultaneous interpretation will also be provided in French.

May 31

7:30 – 9 a.m. ET	Breakfast and Registration
9 – 9:15 a.m. ET	Opening Remarks and Welcome	Jim Ghadbane President and CEO, CANARIE Erik Bitmanis Program Manager, Private Sector Innovation, CANARIE
9:15 – 10:15 a.m. ET	Keynote: Past, Present, and Future of AI: An Audio and Music Perspective This talk provides an overview of 20 years of audio and music analysis research, using techniques from artificial intelligence. In addition to discussing well-known topics, like music classification and recommendation, more exotic applications will be covered such as automatically detecting when rats laugh, analyzing years of recorded orca vocalizations, teaching a virtual violinist to bow, and making robots that can listen and play music. Through these applications of audio and music analysis, to the talk will reflect on the history of AI and speculate on the future challenges and opportunities in audio and music research, as well as AI in general.	George Tzanetakis Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria
10:15 – 10:45 a.m. ET	Networking Break and Poster Sessions
10:45 – 11:05 a.m. ET	Preservation of Research Software Research data management is an increasingly common topic of discussion, as Canadian funders and other research bodies try to ensure the long-term accessibility and usefulness of data generated in their research programs. However, much less time is spent thinking about the long-term importance of research software. The preservation of research software is just as important to ensure the lasting impact of Canadian research. This talk will discuss the importance of research software preservation and highlight some Canadian and international initiatives that point to a possible future approach to ensure that research software remains useful over time.	Steve Marks Digital Preservation Librarian, University of Toronto
11:05 – 11:25 a.m. ET	From pydns to DNS.jl: How We Translated Our Python Package to Julia Julia is a relatively new programming language, originally developed for the computational science community. Julia’s main goal has been to solve the “two-language problem” – the language used for prototyping is different than the one used to write performance-critical parts of the software, due to slowness of dynamic languages like Python. Also, the composability offered by Julia allows for writing architecture-agnostic code that natively runs on CPU and GPU. This talk will explain how pydns was translated to Julia and the benefits.	Amin Sadeghi Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Waterloo
11:25 – 11:45 p.m. ET	A Holistic Approach to Pain Relief for Research Software Developers Developing sustainable research software is painful. Pain points include not enough time for documentation and testing; insufficient experience with development or technology; frequent changes. One treatment is literate programming: developers write programs with human understandability as the first goal. For example, Org-mode with Babel. Another pain treatment is code generation, i.e., programs that write code. For example, Matlab and Maple have code generation facilities. In this holistic approach to pain management, literate programming and code generation are combined via a pervasively generative approach. It is about more than just code: documentation is generated as well as test scripts, test results, build files, reports, and other resources. The holistic approach addresses all pain points.	Spencer Smith Associate Professor, Computing and Software Department, McMaster University, McMaster University
11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m. ET	Lunch and Networking
1 – 1:20 p.m. ET	Fostering Dynamic Interdisciplinary Co-creation Through Simulation of Complex Workflows into User-friendly Interfaces Neuroimaging is a multidisciplinary collaborative process where scientists, clinicians and engineers collaborate on multidimensional and complex data mining. This presentation focuses on the non-technical issues surrounding integration of new clinical software into an existing software platform. We achieved the objectives of a CANARIE-funded RS3 project (facilitating neuropharmacological research) using a user-centered and agile software engineering approach. Our team building and management strategy helped us address three challenges successfully: Effective communication among clinicians and software engineers; Simplification of workflows across heterogenous softwares and data modalities; Facilitating training via simulation and visualization tools to accelerate scaling up.	Najmeh Khalili-Mahani McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, McGill University
1:20 – 1:40 p.m. ET	Connecting Systems Together is No Small Feat As online data repositories proliferate, the likelihood of data overlaps and redundancies grow. In the environmental information sector, even within just Ontario data, several systems with data overlaps occur. This presentation will review how the developers of a system focused on small, wadable streams connected, linked, or even synchronized to half a dozen other systems with related data. In support of the FAIR principles of data management, researchers are given easier access to related data sources. Mitigating related concerns, such as detecting broken links, improving sustainability, and reconciling remote system restructuring will also be discussed.	Doug Mulholland Technical Manager, Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo
1:40 – 2:00 p.m. ET	crescent.cloud – Lessons Learned: From Pipelines to an Interactive Web Application CReSCENT, CanceR Single Cell ExpressioN Toolkit (https://crescent.cloud), is an interactive and scalable web portal incorporating a containerized pipeline execution engine for standardized analysis of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. The analysis of scRNA-seq data requires high-performance computing infrastructure, high-quality reference datasets, and user expertise to write and run analyses – especially for cancer interpretation. This talk will discuss the necessary steps with CReSCENT to containerize and deploy complex, single-cell analyses via Common Workflow Language (CWL) pipelines within a React web application stack, powered by GraphQL. Current advancements in the stack, while scaling to a national Compute Canada cloud environment will also be covered.	Suluxan Mohanraj Software Developer, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre Martin Pham Software Developer, University Health Network (UHN)
2 – 2:05 p.m. ET	The Role of Computational Fluid Dynamics in Improving Clinical Decision Making: a journey The information contained within clinical testing and imaging remains under-exploited that limits the efficacy of treatments. This talk will discuss applications where computational fluid dynamics is used to elicit the relationships between structure (imaging) and function (hemodynamic risks). The underlying computational technology and its future development requirements will also be covered.	Sanjay Kharche Western University
2:05 – 2:10 p.m. ET	Simplified Teaching and Research Application Platform The STRAP project is an opinionated platform for deploying container-based applications with several key functionalities already provided. The goal is for researchers to develop and deploy applications without having to worry about boring stuff like authentication. This means that research computing staff don’t need to learn the deep details for each application, or worry that a researcher is leaking user credentials. Researchers and site administrators work in their areas of expertise, providing the researchers with institutional, social or federated authentication, centralized log in, and database services for free, by default and ready to go. STRAP uses well-known and well-supported technologies that run on cloud infrastructure managed by the UVic RCS team.	Drew Leske Senior ARC Software Dev Team Lead, University of Victoria
2:10 – 2:15 p.m. ET	Bring Your Own ID (BYOID) for Research Software In some situations (e.g. research portals, longitudinal studies, etc.), research subjects may interact directly with research software. An account relationship with the subject may be needed. Establishing and maintaining research subject accounts can be fraught with problems. What if subjects could use existing account IDs? This talk will discuss using free and open source software to ‘federate’ IDs with the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.	Ryan McRonald Senior Security Analyst, University of Victoria
2:15 – 2:20 p.m. ET	What’s Up with All These Researchers Using Our Open Source Software? This lightning talk will blitz through what makes the technology developed at reelyActive attractive to researchers, and what part, if any, open source plays. The talk will also discuss why a for-profit startup choose to publish and not patent their own innovations and what researchers have achieved in hospitals, service stations, construction sites, experimental stores, preschools, and even buses and what these all have in common.	Jeffrey Dungen Co-founder and CEO, reelyActive
2:20 – 2:50 p.m. ET	Networking Break and Poster Sessions
2:50 – 3:10 p.m. ET	FreezeMan: A Software Approach to a Lab Information Management System FreezeMan was originally conceived as a sample tracking system handling a high volume of COVID-19 samples received at McGill University, by tracking, organizing, and managing those samples. The platform is evolving into a new system that keeps track of data associated with experiments, instruments, quality control results and laboratory workflows. The presentation discusses the software challenges the development team encountered to keep up with evolution of the next generation sequencing research. Challenges include complex data modeling along with data ingestion and management, API support of open source and commercial bioinformatics tools, as well as scripting languages used by scientific researches and targeted user interfaces for lab technicians and managers.	Sebastian Ballesteros Ramirez Software Developer, Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G)
3:10 – 3:30 p.m. ET	A Lightweight Workflow Management Framework for Scientific Research Data Management This talk describes ongoing work on the design of a lightweight, modular framework for the development of scientific research data management workflows on distributed computing resources within a single security domain. The Lightweight Workflow Management (LWM) framework separates data management and data processing functionality by applying basic results from Petri net synthesis. The resulting loose-coupling of processing and data management subsystems minimizes the need for complex workflow coordination infrastructure. Implementation decisions will be described for four different distributed architectures. We will end by explaining how this approach has made it possible to customize metadata management databases (endpoints for many management workflows) to individual projects needs.	Ian Percel Lead Research Software Developer, University of Calgary Xiaofang (Ada) Xing Research Software Developer, University of Calgary
3:30 – 3:50 p.m. ET	Leveraging Open Source Software for the Humanities and Social Sciences: The Canadian HSS Commons This talk will examine the open source software behind the Canadian Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS) Commons—an in-development, national-scale, bilingual space that combines elements of social networking sites and institutional repositories. In particular, the talk will explore the challenges of adapting software originally developed in the US, for STEM fields, to meet the needs of Canadian HSS researchers (drawing on examples from work with CANARIE and other partners). The team’s interest in developing digital research infrastructure with functionality and design that is responsive to community needs, will also be covered. There is an increasing awareness of how such infrastructure can be leveraged to support more open, collaborative forms of RDM in Canada and beyond.	Graham Jensen Mitacs Elevate / Accelerate Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities), University of Victoria
3:50 – 4:10 p.m. ET	Research Web Application Development: A Hybrid Approach With the increasing need to enable shareability and collaboration in research, there is a growing requirement for research-based tools to adopt web-based applications. The portability of such applications allows easy user data management, maintenance, open access and the ability to collaborate from anywhere in the world. However, there is also a need to address security of the information being collected for research purposes through such web applications. There is often a great dilemma when it comes to technological choices for such development work. The framework allows the deployment of features that includes synchronous collaboration, access management, open access, maintainability, and customizability of the web app, with a rich user interface and low code for researchers.	Paul Mercier IT Manager, University of Ottawa
4:10 – 4:30 p.m. ET	FRDR Sensitive Data Project The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) Sensitive Data Project aims to improve sensitive data access and management for researchers and institutions. This national project has two main components: a zero-knowledge encryption platform to support data security, and a policy development framework to support collaboration and coordination among institutions. The aim is to provide a safe and reliable sensitive data repository service, and to work collaboratively with partners to ensure the service meets the needs of researchers, institutions, and stakeholders. The FRDR Sensitive Data Project is inviting Canadian post-secondary institutions to participate in the pilot.	Victoria Smith Policy, Privacy and Sensitive Data Coordinator, Digital Research Alliance of Canada
5 – 7 p.m. ET	Reception (Foyer)

June 1

7:30 – 9 a.m. ET	Breakfast and Registration
9 – 9:20 a.m. ET	CBRAIN: A Web-based, Distributed Computing Platform for Collaborative Neuroinformatics Research CBRAIN is an open source, web-based, collaborative research software platform designed to address major challenges in big data research through a single consistent framework. CBRAIN provides researchers in neuroinformatics, genomics, biology and more the ability to easily collaborate, store and analyze data at scale using pipelines on heterogeneous computing and data resources across Canada and around the world. In this talk the technology and architecture underpinning CBRAIN will be presented together with the software developments that address the technical requirements of several major neuroinformatics projects. CBRAIN will also be presented in the larger context of the NeuroHub technology platform of McGill University’s Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives initiative.	Bryan Caron McGill University
9:20 – 9:40 a.m. ET	Solving a Research Problem with Open Source Software: A Story of Collaboration Researchers from the Faculty of administration at Université Laval needed software to analyze large corpora. The goal was to obtain multiple readability scores per document. However, no known software had these features or could handle such a volume. Readability algorithms were added to Trombone, an open-source text analysis software, which led to contact and collaboration with the maintainers to implement and integrate the algorithms into the project. This led to the development of PyTrombone, a tool to manipulate Trombone from Python that used to process documents in batches on Compute Canada. The software development in this project contributed to open-source software and created a Python library that makes it possible to interact with it.	Gabriel Couture Research Software Developer, Université Laval
9:40 – 10 a.m. ET	Redesigning the FRDR Discovery Interface: Better, Stronger, Geospatial-er The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) is an innovative tool that makes research data from over 80 Canadian repositories discoverable via a text-based search and a separate map-based search. Powered by the CANARIE-seed-funded software Geodisy, the map search makes data with geospatial information discoverable based on its location. The Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s FRDR team has now undertaken a project with the goal of merging these two interfaces into one, allowing users to seamlessly combine keyword and map-based queries in one enhanced search tool. In this presentation, we will share an update on the existing map search tool and plans for discovery interface redesign.	Mark Goodwin Metadata Coordinator, University of British Columbia
10 – 10:30 a.m. ET	Networking Break and Poster Sessions
10:30 – 11:30 a.m. ET	Keynote: Code Fingerprinting for Cybersecurity With the growing popularity of automation and digitalization, the prevalence of IoT systems is more than ever. The security of digital systems, however, still lags behind, as evidenced by the increasing rate and sophistication of recent attacks. Oftentimes, these attacks are enabled by running a malicious code that exploits vulnerabilities in the underlying software or firmware image. To mitigate such alarming threats, a tradecraft of code fingerprinting techniques is needed. This talk will present how to automatically fingerprint binary code to enable several security applications, such as determining compiler provenance, characterizing authors, identifying library functions, and detecting vulnerable functions. In particular, this talk will emphasize a scalable framework that we designed and implemented to identify vulnerable functions in industrial IoT device firmware images through binary code analysis.	Paria Shirani Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Toronto Metropolitan University
11:30 – 1 p.m. ET	Lunch and Poster Sessions
1 – 1:20 p.m. ET	Building an ETL Platform for Social Science Research Université Laval’s Educational Leadership Chair of digital social sciences required tooling and techniques to better handle the growing amount of research data and replace common cloud solutions like Dropbox. The initial approach limited the scope of future projects like continuous scraping of media sources or complex pipelines that merged sources of information together. A set of tools was developed that formed a central hub to manage user access, store and query data, handle pipeline management, which was accessible via both a REST API and R API to facilitate and accelerate research and quick testing. This talk will discuss the project and its development challenges, as well as how it can solve problems for researchers.	Olivier Banville Software Developer, Université Laval
1:20 – 1:40 p.m. ET	Harnessing Big Data: A Technique and Tool for User Directed Selective Data Filtering Large volumes of data are available in many domains but a specific user is often interested in a small subset of this data. This talk concerns our NSERC funded research project on devising a technique for filtering data based on user preferences. The filtering tool takes a keyword set as input and stores only those parts of the raw data that match the user preferences. It uses Apache Spark’s parallel processing framework to reduce filtering time and its machine learning library for data classification. The prototype/tool shows a large reduction in stored data volume and orders of magnitude reduction in search latency for the user. The talk will include the algorithm, the filtering software and applications e.g. (i) medical practitioner use case and (ii) scientific researcher use case.	Shikharesh Majumdar Carleton University
1:40 – 1:45 p.m. ET	COVID-MVP: An Interactive Visualization Application to Track SARS-CoV-2 Mutation and Variants of Concern with a Focus on the Functional Impact This talk will discuss an open-source visualization-focused application COVID-MVP. It is powered by the high-throughput genomic workflow to visualize SARS-CoV-2 genomes w.r.t to mutations. COVID-MVP provides: 1. An interactive heatmap to visualize and compare mutations in SARS-CoV-2 variants; 2. Mutation profiles and contextual information; 3. Annotation of biological impacts for mutations where functional data is available in the literature; 4. Summarized information for each variant in the form of a surveillance report; and 5. The ability to upload raw data for rapid processing and annotating for real-time visualization. COVID-MVP is developed using the Plotly and Dash frameworks of Python. It is a stand-alone application that can also be integrated into other surveillance frameworks.	Zohaib Anwar Postdoctoral Researcher, Simon Fraser University
1:45 – 1:50 p.m. ET	Indoc Pilot – A Unified Research Informatics Platform The Indoc Pilot Platform is a unified research informatics platform that enables collection, federation, analysis and sharing of participant data across sites, studies, and data modalities. The solution consists of three core components: 1. The Pilot Data Platform provides core data collection, cataloguing, federation, marshalling and analytics services. 2. The Researcher Portal (CANARIE RDM-103) provides research teams with unified interface to access and utilize the Pilot Data Platform services and data, enabling data sharing and collaborative analysis. 3.The Patient Data Gateway (CANARIE RDM-063) provides study participants with a secure, user-friendly environment to contribute data and interact with study staff, enabling enhanced participant engagement and empowerment.	Shahab Shahnazari Indoc Research
1:50 – 2 p.m.	Stretch break
2 – 3 p.m. ET	Keynote: The Integrated DRI Landscape – Establishing a New Service and Funding Model An update on the critical current work of building a new service and funding model and what this means for research software. This collaborative work with co-funders, partners and stakeholders, will build the foundation for the DRI ecosystem in Canada.	Ghilaine Roquet VP Strategy & Planning, Digital Research Alliance of Canada
3 – 3:05 p.m. ET	Survey and Poster Awards	Scott Henwood Senior Director,  Cybersecurity Programs, CANARIE
3:05 – 3:10 p.m. ET	Closing Remarks	Mark Wolff Chief Technology Officer, CANARIE

Keynote Speakers

George Tzanetakis

Professor, Department of Computer Science | University of Victoria

Dr. Tzanetakis is Professor in Computer Science (also cross-listed in Music and Electrical and Computer Engineering) at the University of Victoria. He is one of the pioneers of Music Information Retrieval, and from 2010 to 2020 he was a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in the computer analysis of audio and music. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in May 2002,XS and was a PostDoctoral Fellow (2002-2003) at Carnegie Mellon University working on query-by-humming systems with Prof. Dannenberg and on video retrieval and microphone array processing with the Informedia group. His classic paper on automatic music genre classification has had significant impact (3846 citations, Google Scholar, May 2022), and was awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Young Author award in 2004. He has more than 200 publications spanning all areas of audio and music processing combining ideas from digital signal processing and machine learning. He is also an active musician and has studied saxophone performance, piano, music theory, and composition.

Paria Shirani

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science | Toronto Metropolitan University

Paria Shirani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Toronto Metropolitan University. She joined Toronto Metropolitan University from an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship position at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), USA. During her PhD, she was awarded the FRQNT Doctoral Scholarship. Paria received her PhD degree in information systems engineering from Concordia University, where her research explored several important cybersecurity problems (e.g., malware analysis and vulnerable function detection) and built practical security frameworks and tools. Her recent research focuses on several fields of cybersecurity, such as code fingerprinting and malware analysis, IoT security, vulnerability research, and threat intelligence generation.

Ghilaine Roquet

Vice President, Strategy and Planning | The Digital Research Alliance of Canada

Ghilaine Roquet is a former Associate Vice-Principal, Information Technology and CIO at McGill University. She has more than 20 years of experience in IT in higher education, previously serving as Associate Vice-Rector and CIO at l’Université de Montréal and as Director, IT Services at HEC-Montréal. Ms. Roquet is a Past President of the Canadian University Council of Chief Information Officers (CUCCIO) and a former member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Réseau d’informations scientifiques du Québec (RISQ).

Travel

Accommodations

Humaniti Hotel is in the heart of downtown Montréal near Quartier des Spectacles, surrounded by a wealth of art and culture.

We have secured a room block at the Humaniti at the discounted rate of $249/night + taxes. Rooms in this block are limited, so please book your accommodations as soon as possible.

Local Dining

Montreal is host to a wide range of restaurants to fit every palate. The city’s ethnic diversity will allow you to travel the tastes of the globe as you explore your surroundings.

Travel to Montreal

Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport

Visit the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport website to find flight information and rental car options. Transportation is also available directly from the terminal to downtown Ottawa via bus, taxi, limousine, or Uber.

VIA Rail

VIA Rail provides frequent daily service to Montreal from most Canadian cities. Montreal’s Central Station is a short five-minute walk to the Humaniti Hotel.

Public Transit

The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) provides comprehensive transit information for Montreal’s bus and metro system. The InterContinental Montreal is easily accessible by bus or metro from the airport and train station.

Speakers

Steve Marks

Digital Preservation Librarian, University of Toronto

+ Read Bio

Steve Marks is the Digital Preservation Librarian at the University of Toronto Libraries, where he is responsible for the long-term care and maintenance of the library’s digital collections. Steve has worked on national RDM initiatives since 2010, when he started at Scholars Portal, a shared IT service provider for Ontario universities. He was involved with Research Data Canada and currently serves as the co-chair of the Preservation Experts Group for the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

Mohammad Amin Sadeghi

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Waterloo

+ Read Bio

Mohammad Amin Sadeghi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Waterloo. His research is on pore-scale modeling of electrochemical devices. He is also one of the core developers of OpenPNM, a library for pore network simulations, and PoreSpy, for analyzing tomography images of porous materials.

Spencer Smith

Associate Professor, Computing and Software Department, McMaster University, McMaster University

+ Read Bio

Spencer obtained his undergraduate and graduate (M.Eng., Ph.D.) degrees in Civil Engineering from McMaster. In 2000 he started a position as an Assistant Professor in the newly formed Department of Computing and Software at McMaster. Currently, Spencer is an Associate Professor. His research focuses on improving the quality of scientific computing software via the application of software engineering methods. Spencer obtained his Professional Engineering license (PEng) in 2006.

Najmeh Khalili-Mahani

McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, McGill University

+ Read Bio

Najmeh Khalili-Mahani is a biomedical engineer and a pharmaco-imaging neuroscientist whose research focuses on inter-disciplinary translational neuroimaging. She is a senior Research Associate at McGill University and Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Concordia University. She is the Co-PI of the CANARIE RS3-031 project entitled: CBRAIN for Multidisciplinary Reproducible Science.

Doug Mulholland

Technical Manager, Computer Systems Group, University of Waterloo

+ Read Bio

As online data repositories proliferate, the likelihood of data overlaps and redundancies grow. In the environmental information sector, even within just Ontario data, several systems with data overlaps occur. This presentation will review how the developers of a system focused on small, wadeable streams connected, linked, or even synchronized to half a dozen other systems with related data. In support of the FAIR principles of data management, researchers are given easier access to related data sources. Mitigating related concerns, such as detecting broken links, improving sustainability, and reconciling remote system restructuring will also be discussed.

Suluxan Mohanraj

Software Developer, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

+ Read Bio

Suluxan Mohanraj is a software developer in the Pugh Lab at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto where he is responsible for building bioinformatics applications to empower researchers and clinicians and improve data accessibility. He leads the development of CReSCENT, a web portal for single-cell analysis, and P.L.B.R, a liquid biopsy database for cell-free DNA. He is also a part-time professor at Seneca College in the School of Software Design and Data Science.

Martin Pham

Software Developer, University Health Network (UHN)

+ Read Bio

Martin is a developer in the DATA Team at University Health Network in Toronto as well as a graduate student in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto. At the hospital, he develops software for computational and clinical researchers. At UofT, his research is related to biological plausibility and neurosymbolic dynamical systems for robotics applications.

Sanjay Kharche

Western University

+ Read Bio

Sanjay is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who uses routine clinical data to elicit deeper understanding of hemodynamic risks in human blood vessels.

Drew Leske

Senior ARC Software Dev Team Lead, University of Victoria

+ Read Bio

Drew Leske is a software developer and past systems administrator with 20 years’ experience supporting research computing, administering HPC clusters and other infrastructure at the University of Victoria and later creating support software with Compute Canada. His current role is team lead for development of ARC software in UVic’s Research Computing Services group.

Ryan McRonald

Senior Security Analyst, University of Victoria

+ Read Bio

Ryan McRonald is a Senior Security Analyst with the University of Victoria. He supports advanced research computing for uVic and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Over his career, he has been responsible for designing secure systems, assessing systems, and for managing compliance.

Jeffrey Dungen

Co-founder and CEO, reelyActive

+ Read Bio

Jeffrey is a computer engineer with nearly two decades of experience in RFID and IoT startups, including reelyActive. He has co-authored several IEEE publications and contributed extensively to open source software development to this end, including a CANARIE BoosterPack for IoT.

Sebastian Ballesteros Ramirez

Software Developer, Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G)

+ Read Bio

While pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering at McGill University, Sebastian joined the Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics as an intern in 2020 working in projects such as EpiShare and Bento, which involved genomic and epigenomic data. He contributed to the development and implementation of software solutions in multiple technologies. After graduation, he joined the team as a Software Developer to work mainly on the FreezeMan platform.

Ian Percel

Lead Research Software Developer, University of Calgary

+ Read Bio

Ian Percel (they/them) is currently the lead research software developer for the Local Research Software Support team in Research Computing Services at the University of Calgary. They have spent the last nine years as a high-performance computing specialist, data scientist, and data engineer. In 2018, they completed a doctorate in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a specialization in applied mathematics.

Xiaofang (Ada) Xing

Research Software Developer, University of Calgary

+ Read Bio

Ada (she) is currently a research software developer for the Local Research Software Support team in Research Computing Services at the University of Calgary. She is working for designing and implementing the data pipeline and workflow management within the team, before that, worked as a software developer in industry, building web app and machine learning model. In 2018, she completed a bachelor of computer science and mathematics at the University of Alberta.

Graham Jensen

Mitacs Elevate / Accelerate Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities), University of Victoria

+ Read Bio

Graham Jensen is a Mitacs Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities) in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. He is also Principal Investigator of the forthcoming Canadian Modernist Magazines Project. From 2001-2011, he was Executive Director of Media Manifesto (a web design company). His research interests include digital humanities, open publishing and pedagogy, critical infrastructure studies, and critical design studies.

Paul Mercier

IT Manager, University of Ottawa

+ Read Bio

Paul Mercier started his career at uOttawa in 1990 in the computing and management fields. He worked at the Office of the President, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, and at the Faculty of Science. From 2009 to 2017, he was the IT Manager for Infrastructure Services. Since then, he fills in the role of IT Manager for research support. He holds four degrees from the University of Ottawa.

Victoria Smith

Digital Research Alliance of Canada

+ Read Bio

Victoria Smith specializes in sensitive data, privacy, and research policy, and is passionate about intelligent data access. In her work with the Alliance’s Research Data Management team, Victoria leads a sensitive data repository project based on zero-knowledge encryption and collaborative policy framework development. She is also engaging in relationship building with stakeholders, supporting the Sensitive Data Expert Group, and providing guidance and input on other projects.

Bryan Caron

McGill University

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Bryan Caron is leader of the CBRAIN platform and Co-Principal Investigator and Director, Operations and Development of the NeuroHub project, a core facility platform of McGill University’s Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives initiative. Prior to leading CBRAIN and NeuroHub, Bryan was a Research Scientist, Adjunct Professor and Director, Business Operations of the McGill High Performance Computing Centre. Bryan has over 20 years of experience in high performance computing and data intensive science.

Gabriel Couture

Research Software Developer, Université Laval

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Gabriel Couture is a graduate (B.Sc.) from Laval University in physics and is about to complete a master’s degree (M.Sc.) in good practices in data engineering in radiation oncology at the CHU de Québec – Université Laval. As part of the Université Laval Research Software Development Support Team for over a year, Gabriel has participated in software development in multiple spheres of research, such as health, hydrology, text analysis, and geographic data manipulation.

Mark Goodwin

Metadata Coordinator, University of British Columbia

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As Metadata Coordinator at the University of British Columbia, Mark works closely with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s Research Data Management team. He is responsible for the Federated Research Data Repository’s Discovery Service and leads technical support for the DataCite Canada Consortium. Mark is passionate about improving access to information and is excited to help enhance discoverability of research data in Canada.

Olivier Banville

Software Developer, Université Laval

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Olivier C. Banville is a graduate (BSSC) from Université Laval and full-stack developer for the same establishment. As part of the Université Laval’s Research Software Development Support Team for over a year, Olivier has participated in the development of several tools, platforms and software used in multiple spheres of research, including animal biology, political science, and healthcare.

Ali Hirji

Durham College

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Ali Hirji works at the AI Hub and the Centre for Cyber Innovation at Durham College. He has over 14 years of experience working on a variety of technology implementations in the government, academic and not for profit sectors.

Shikharesh Majumdar

Carleton University

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Majumdar is a Chancellor’s Professor & the Director of Real Time and Distributed Systems Research Centre at Dep. of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University. He is a Fellow of IET, a member of ACM, and a senior member of IEEE. He was the Distinguished Visitor for IEEE Computer Society (1998-2001). His research is funded by NSERC, CANARIE & industries. Research projects led by him include CANARIE’s RP-SMARF research platform project. He has received multiple awards from IEEE and ACM.

Zohaib Anwar

Postdoctoral Researcher, Simon Fraser University

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Dr. Anwar is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Center for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health (CIDGOH) at the Simon Fraser University, BC. Dr. Anwar is a computational biologist, developing open-source, reproducible, and portable software and workflow for analyzing genomics data from emerging pathogens e.g., SARS-CoV-2 for the Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (CanCOGeN). His work enables public health labs to analyze and visualize epidemics w.r.t to epidemiological data captured.

Shahab Shahnazari

Indoc Research

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Shahab is Senior Director, Informatics Programs at Indoc Research and is responsible for product and partnership development activities. Prior to joining Indoc, Shahab was with MaRS Discovery District where he led teams focused on engaging the global community in identifying, testing, and implementing novel products that address systemic innovation gaps and needs. He holds a B.Sc. in biochemistry from McMaster University and a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Toronto.

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