 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and SEI's Research Services Innovation Roundtable 2021, beyond Pittsburgh. I am Sheila Rosenthal, Manager of Research Services. We are always delighted to be teaming up with the University Libraries for events, and this is our very first virtual Innovation Roundtable. Since all attendees are muted, we hope that you will use the chat feature to submit your questions and comments for our speakers. Andy Prizbella, Event Planner for the University Libraries, will be the chat moderator. Shannon Riff, the University Libraries Director of Marketing, Communications, and External Relations will provide introductions for both the University Libraries Slash Research Services Program and the SEI Internship Program. This event is being recorded. Please leave your camera off if you prefer that your live photograph not be included in the final recording. At the conclusion of the event, join our two breakout rooms, SEI Internship or CMU Library Slash Research Services Librarians for further questions and discussions. Now, it is with great pleasure and enthusiasm that I would like to introduce our first special guest speaker, Keith Webster, Dean of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Keith has spoken at numerous SEI events and will be known to many of you. Keith joined CMU in 2013, having previously held leadership roles in publishing and in universities and in a number of different countries. The title of his presentation this afternoon is Digital Resilience in Libraries and the Pandemic. Now please join me in welcoming Keith Webster. Thank you very much. You're a good afternoon, everyone. Could I move to the next slide, please? And let's keep on going the other way, thanks. So good afternoon, everyone. I'm truly grateful for the continued partnership with our friends at the SEI. We enjoy both the innovation roundtable and the IT, which have become a feature of our lives every year, and it truly is a wonderful relationship. I thank everyone at the SEI and my team in the University Libraries who have made this event come together so smoothly. I made the mistake, perhaps, of giving a title for what really would be a two-hour seminar or a two-day conference and not a 15-minute soft open. So I'm going to go fairly briskly. And if I could have the next slide, please. The characters that form the word crisis in Chinese come from the words danger and opportunity. We're living through an unprecedented time of disruption. But in this presentation, I want to move beyond danger and talk about the opportunities for innovation in libraries and beyond. If we can thrive on the trends accelerated by the crisis, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime for us. Next slide, please. Tech usage on almost every measure has gone through the roof in the past 12 months. Digital transformation has been the buzzword in business circles for years, as companies tried to rethink everything about how they operate. It turns out that for the disciples of digitization, there's nothing like a global pandemic to drive change. Indeed, the first behavioral change across an entire population is something that big tech's marketing departments couldn't have dreamt of. And reminded that Satyam Mandela, the chief executive of Microsoft, observed that social and physical distancing requirements as the pandemic really took hold created a remote everything mindset, bringing forward the adoption of a wide range of technologies, such as those on the screen, by two years or more. Next slide, please. The pandemic has accelerated and intensified trends that were already underway. The result has been a dramatic widening of the gap between those at the top and the bottom of many sectors. And that inevitably will play out in our universities and in turn in our libraries. The full plans in university budgets and business models that we understood intellectually for some time before the COVID-19 crisis have now become fissures, separating the old reality from the new one, as we absorb sweeping budget shifts alongside demands for new ways of being a student of doing scholarship. But rather than tweaking things incrementally, I view the crisis as pointing to new priorities, rendering obsolete established budgets and business models, along with the accelerated pace of change comes a unique opportunity to unlock big strategic moves. I've spoken at past events about the remarkable speed and breadth of changes brought about by the fourth industrial revolution. I contend that the pandemic will accelerate innovation even more, encouraging changes already underway and strengthening the digital activities of any organization. Next slide, please. Much of the organizational inertia that usually stands in the way of unlocking these big moves is now gone as we respond rapidly, both to completely new demands and to the great acceleration of trends, as I've already mentioned, and we're seeing this play out across all aspects of our lives. Some of our old habits will certainly return. But many of the behaviors that we've been forced to adopt during the past year, through the notewrking, will through familiarity become more natural. This transition towards more digital everything in our professional and personal lives will also be supported and accelerated by regulators. We've seen this play out rapidly in areas like telemedicine. And in the library world, new services have emerged to circumvent the ordinary constraints of copyright to provide new forms of digital access to copies of printed materials. What's worth noting is that to a remarkable degree, industries that were experiencing decline before the crisis have suffered even greater declines because of it. And those that were growing their profit have seen outsized gains. And if you think about, for example, retail malls and online shopping or streaming services and the way in which they've outperformed their traditional satellite-based and movie theater peers, you'll get a sense of these extreme shifts. What I think we've seen is that those organizations with resilient, future-ready business models had the infrastructure in place and were able to move quickly. And we're now seeing organizations think about what happens next and the priorities and resource needs required to flourish. And in libraries and in universities, I think we need to keep a very keen eye on what we are seeing in the business sector as that shapes so much of our behaviors. Next slide, please. Another way in which we can think about how trends might unfold is by looking to China. China has led the way because it has been on the front lines both of the post-pandemic economic recovery and of the societal changes the pandemic has precipitated. As that recovery takes shape, several important shifts in the makeup of China's economic landscape have already become apparent. COVID-19 has accelerated pre-existing trends and I should, in the arrival of a future that was already on track to be realized, but not quite on this time scale. Prior to COVID-19, the continuous pursuit of innovation by large technology companies and venture capital investment in key digital technologies drove the rapid evolution of China's digital landscape. The virus may well has driven the emergence of new digital solutions necessary for companies and consumers who have been forced to observe physical distancing, driving the rapid growth of a state home economy and transforming consumer and employee behavior in ways that are likely to ensure. All of these changes occurred ahead of wide-scale deployment of 5G technology and I think we will see that catalyze further the use and performance of digital tools and sustain China's position as the world's growth engine. We certainly need to watch closely how China and its research and academic communities emerge from the pandemic. Next slide, please. For those thriving on the trends accelerated by the crisis, this could be their time and many are seizing the opportunity, acquiring missing elements of their future ecosystems and building different types of demand and capacity. I truly see successful libraries in this position. The sources are much easier to reallocate when no one needs to be convinced of the need for a rapid response or rapid decision making and when the organizational and individual performance targets set before the crisis no longer apply. What I thought would never be possible like in now doing two weeks has become a common mantra. For those services in the middle of the pack, this is a wake-up call. Can the unfreezing of the organization and its resources be used to leap forward into new trends? And for those services in the bottom of our priorities, legacy operations and the like, this might be the right time to wind down our supportive non-strategic activities. Our plans and aspirations for my place can take much from this. Whilst we're seeing budget cuts across the higher education sector, in many cases these will not be permanent. Universities have in the short run had to absorb widespread shocks to their operating revenue through things like students unable to arrive in the country, not occupying residential accommodation, but they have also had to invest in areas to allow for continued operations. Think about the spend on upgrading HVAC, installing plexiglass, adding cleaning, as well as supporting online and hybrid learning. For me, that signals the opportunity for libraries. What are the things we need to do that will add value in the present time, here and now? And how and where can we find the money to support? Are the new funds, for example, for online learning activities, that we can access? And are there costs that we can divest? But I would inject a cautionary note slightly tongue-in-cheek, just as I could readily apportion our services across a priority spectrum, we must recognise that so too can universities apportion their macro-level services across such a spectrum. Next slide, please. Some of our services may find themselves in a position of strength, while others will face challenging times. Regardless of our context, though, given the speed at which this crisis has been unfolding and the great acceleration of trends accompanying it, we will need to be faster, bolder and more agile than ever before to succeed. We are only in the early stages of the followed from the pandemic. Do we fully understand and grasp the downside scenarios of the crisis and understand our ability to thrive in the next normal? Do we have a plan to avoid being drawn further into a downward spiral? Do we understand how we rebuild our momentum? I think, and those of you who have worked with me on future studies will know that, to me, the answer should take note of work from the foresight and future studies field. Next slide, please. A great lesson from me from the pandemic is to put in a quote somewhere that people can read whilst I sip some liquid. Next slide, please. In a time of rapid innovation, signals of change are all around us. The challenge is to see the big future trends branch from those weak signals. Thinking about the future and building strategies and services to meet institutional and wider coordination partners needs is absolutely critical. And I know that Tom will talk more about collaboration later this afternoon. But even as the world stares a hundred year virus in the face, there's a longer story to be written. Right now, today, and this story has to be told by all of us because the stories we write and the actions we take today will shape how we emerge from the pandemic. Next slide, please. COVID-19 has been an extinction event in some sectors. I've already talked about retail models, hopefully not extinction, but certainly downward pressure on tourism and airlines amongst others. And in our field, it's important to think about the impact on universities and their libraries. The definition of the scholarly record, the designation of those publications that should constitute the record, has always been the library's primary function. Until quite recently, what constituted the scholarly record was fairly clear, and we understood that portion that was the library's responsibility, acquiring, building, using collections of books and journals and providing the expertise of live playians and the facilities of reading rooms to support their use. Next slide, please. Today, lots of research materials, though, are not appearing in printed books and journals, but are being generated in digital form. And that offers a great opportunity because they are relatively easy and cheap to store, share and preserve. This has prompted a vast expansion of the scholarly record beyond books and journals found on library stacks. And I think it's an easy claim that at this moment in time, the most important new piece of the scholarly record is data, and founders and others now recognize that they get the best return on the funding they allocate for research by ensuring that data produced by one research project is able to be shared and reused by others. Next slide. COVID-19 has sure how collaboration at scale can make a difference between researchers and participants in university and healthcare and corporate sectors and across national boundaries. Data and publications all have been shared on a scale that we've never seen before. And I hear a growing agreement that we can't go back to days of paywalls and isolating data sets. Next slide, please. Alongside this, a new generation of researchers and practitioners are making moves, embracing new ways of sharing their work. And we are providing access to the tools and services they need to participate. And my colleagues will say more about that in a little while. Next slide, please. We have to support the shift towards open access publishing executed a number of agreements with an array of publishers. You can see these on the slide. And participation in these agreements is open to everyone at Carnegie Mellon, including everyone at the SEI. I know a number of you already have taken advantage of this. Next slide, please. As I think about our response and our shift into the future, I like to structure my thoughts into these three chronological areas, responding to the pandemic, recovering, and then thriving as we move forward. Next slide, please. Taking thousands of courses online in the space of 10 days was a huge lift, but it was overwhelmingly successful for the university and showed the potential of digital delivery and participation on many fronts. And at the same time, we saw almost all research move online. Both of these shifts and the significance of the library's enabling role provided us with an opportunity to refresh our relationship with faculty and students. We've worked to optimize and build upon our digital presence within CMU, and we're now working to build a definitive digital library brand. Next slide, please. Decisions which have been quickly taken in recent months may determine the dominant ongoing profile of our services. We will increasingly need to allocate the spend on information resources, faculty and staff, and other facilities against criteria emerging from institutional priorities that are shaped by the pandemic response. We'll need to review our design of space, both for our employees and our users, because I can't imagine that everyone wants to be squeezed into tight offices and group study rooms when we reopen more fully. And we have become much more focused on what's right for CMU. What are the core aspects of the university that we need to support? Next slide, please. As we look to the future, I think there are some key markers on the horizon. The move towards open and the shift away from vest journal subscriptions, freeing up money for us to invest in innovative services. The growth of data sharing mandates from research funders driving the expansion of the expanded scope on the record. We need more directly to support online and hybrid learning requiring greater access to digital content and greater availability of expert librarians. And as academic work becomes more grounded in the broad information universe than what is physically held in your local library, that will point to an increasingly complex information landscape. Requiring new skills, new relationships and new opportunities to curate, manage and make much more discoverable the scholarly record. Final slide, please. But if I could build one of these, I probably still would because it is wonderful eye candy. Thank you very much. I hope to have a chance to talk with more of you either offline or in the breakout groups later this afternoon. I think Shannon is picking up next. Thank you, Keith. So I am Shannon Riff, Director of Marketing, Communications and External Relations at the University Libraries. And at this time, I would like to welcome and introduce my libraries and SEI colleagues for their presentation, University Libraries and Research Services here to collaborate and consult with you. They are Rachel Callison, Senior Research Librarian Research Services at SEI. Hannah Gunderman, Research Data Management Consultant at the University Libraries. Melanie Ganey, Liaison Librarian and Co-Director of Open Science and Data Collaborations Program at the libraries. And Wajin Wong is not able to join us today. So take it away. Good afternoon. I'm Rachel Callison. I'm from SEI Research Services, which provides information resources and research assistance to the Software Engineering Institute. Through consultations and collaborations, we work directly with members of the technical staff, and that includes interns and supported the SEI's many research projects and activities. Our primary goal is to save our researchers time and effort by putting the information and resources they need at their fingertips and via their desktops. And as librarians, we're able to tap into that vast information ecosystem that Keith was just talking about. We frequently collaborate with librarian colleagues at other universities, organizations, and federally funded research and development centers, which is what SEI is, in order to get those exact resources that our SEI researchers need. And through a relationship with the University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon, SEI Research Services is able to provide access to those thousands of full-text journals and subscription-only database and discovery tools to everyone at the SEI. But the most important resource that campus has to offer is the expertise of our faculty, librarian colleagues. And so up next are two of these expert colleagues, Hannah Gunderman and Melanie Ganey, to provide a brief overview of some of the tools and best practices that are relevant to your own research, such as data and documentation management. So I'm going to hand it over to them. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Rachel. All right. So we're going to go ahead and get started. Again, I'm Hannah Gunderman, and today I'm here to talk about data management. Next slide. So first, what do I mean when I say data management? So I want you to think just in a rhetorical sense, or you can feel free to share and chat if you'd like. Think about the last thing that you organized. So this might be, you know, you organized your bookshelf, you organized your comic book collection, you organized your spice rack, your bathroom cabinet, different things like that. And I want you to just think to yourself, what were the reasons you organized it? And what were the steps you took? What were the goals? What were you trying to accomplish with that? Most of you are probably thinking, well, I want to be able to find stuff more easily because things make more sense as I go to, you know, search for something. Really, data management is just applying this same thing to your research data. It's that idea of keeping it organized, accessible, safe, basically easier to find, not only for yourself, but anybody else who's working with you. So there's, I mean, there is a whole list of things that you can do that are considered, you know, the best practices for managing data. But honestly, there's a few things that if you do those things, you will be doing very good data management. And so I am going to talk about those three things today. And those are going to be file naming documentation and then copies and backups. Next slide. So the first thing is file naming. Again, rhetorical question. Nobody has to necessarily raise their hand with this. But I want you to think and be honest, how many of you have files on your computer that might have names like this? So file one, CSV, file, final, file, final, this one, file, final, this one, final. This is very common. And if you're sitting there going, yeah, I do. That's extremely common and normal. And I don't want you to feel bad about that. But it's hard to find what's in those files. And it's hard to look at those right away and know, okay, what exactly, what version of the file is this? What is in this? And I want to tell you today that taking time now to name your files in a way that just makes sense and is intuitive, benefits you now as well as future you. So some very basic things to include in a good file name would be things like underscores. Really try and avoid spaces in your file names for some software. It's going to make that extremely angry and a lot of command line work. You want to also have some important contextual information. So file one CSV might make sense to you right now. You will probably not remember what's in that six months from now. And your collaborators certainly won't know what's in that. So things like dates, the subjects, maybe your initials, experiment number, things like that. Avoid using the word final. Nothing is really ever final. There's always going to be new changes and revisions and things like that. So I'll give you a little tip in the next few minutes on how to avoid that. And then I would also suggest just trying to keep it under about 32 to 35 characters. And that's not only for human readability, so you don't have file names that are this long, but also again some software is not going to let you have super long file names. And then whatever file naming scheme, that's basically a template for how you're going to organize your file names. Whatever scheme you use, write it down. Write it down somewhere where you're going to look at it and use it. So for an example here, if I was looking at my research and a good file naming scheme, I would have the date. I would have experiment number, my last name, and then version number. And you can see here on the final line what that looks like in action. So we have my date. That's a really good format for dates to use. Experiment one, Gunderman, version two. Again, even if I think that's the last version, it's probably not. So v2, v3, v4, so on and so forth. That's a much cleaner way to help you avoid the file names that might have final listed six times in them. Next slide. Documentation. So I want to remind everybody here on this call that you're wonderful and you're accomplished and capable. If you are doing research, I know for a fact you're doing amazing research. You also probably have a lot of things going on simultaneously. And because of that, it can mean that we forget the little day to day details of what we're doing in our research. And that doesn't mean you're a bad researcher at all. It means you're having a very typical response to having so many things going on at the same time. So documentation is something that really helps. It's basically just writing down what you do in a research project while you're doing it and why. So that might be something like, okay, well, I collected this data and when I decided to use Python to write a script to iterate through this data, I used this for loop for this reason. And then step two, once I had my data exported as a CSV, I did this for this reason, right? Little details that I may not remember six months from now or even a week from now, just because of how busy we are, right? And this can be written down in a lot of different places. So depending on your data, it could be a Word doc, a Google doc, or it could be something like an electronic laboratory or research notebook, which my colleague will talk about after this. Now, with these kind of things, it is going to vary based on what kind of research you're doing. Some research, especially if we're thinking about classified or sensitive data, you're not going to be able to just write down these descriptive details about it. But there's always some way that you can incorporate good documentation practices into your workflow. Next slide. Okay, finally, backups and copies. I'm sure many of us know the deep, visceral, helpless pain of losing data or losing papers or losing code or something like that. Whenever you're working with data, you honestly want to be a bit pessimistic. You want to prepare for the worst. And a good technique that we like to teach for many types of data is the 321 technique. That's essentially having three copies of your data. These live on two different devices with one located off-site, and that could be considered the cloud. So an example of how that might look would be, I have a primary copy on my internal hard drive on my computer, a second copy on my external hard drive, and then a third copy in cloud storage. Again, just like documentation, some data, you are going to have a lot of restrictions on where that can be saved and how many copies that can be saved. So I would just say for anybody on this call, if you want to incorporate this technique into your project, just be sure that you're talking to the right people, understanding where you can save your data safely and where you cannot. Next slide. So finally, if you are not feeling particularly excited by any of this, I would say that's pretty normal, right? It's very procedural. It's very, you know, do this, do this, do this. I just want to say that is normal. And I'm very cognizant that this isn't like a fun conversation on data analysis or visualization and making cool graphs and things like that. It's really just as important though for good research. And one of the things that I love doing with my job is using pop culture to make it more interesting. So all of you who are here and registered, you'll get a post event email that has a link to the inaugural episode of a new web series called pixel data escapes. And the web series is me talking about data management lessons through a lens of video games. The first episode is on Pokemon. So you'll get to learn a little bit more about these techniques, but in a Pokemon lens. And that's all I have today. So now I'm going to pass it off to my colleague, Melanie. Hi, thanks, Hannah. My name is Melanie Ganey, and I'm going to be talking about open science and how we support it in the library. Next slide, please. Okay, I'm just going to start by talking briefly about what exactly open science is. Open science is this broad umbrella term we use to refer to a large set of practices and tools that help make research more transparent and more reproducible. And I just want to say that we use this term open science, but we really mean open research. So this does not just apply to science research. It really applies to research in any area. One of the very important ideas in the open science community is that data should be what we call fair, meaning findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable. And again, we believe that this will help make research transparent and more reproducible. It's important to recognize that, as Hannah was saying, there will be data that cannot be shared. So for example, classified or sensitive data might not be appropriate to be shared widely. So what we aim for is that research is as open as possible, but as closed as necessary. And we are here to help you figure out for any given project where that balance might lie. Next slide, please. So why engage in open science? What are the benefits of it? A really big one is that it helps you get more credit for all of your scholarly work. Historically, researchers really only got credit for a project at the very end when they published a paper. And some of these projects can be quite long. But now you're able to publish not only papers, but also well-documented data, code, and workflows. And you can put that in your CV. So now you can get credit for projects as you work on them as they progress, not just at the very end. It also helps increase the impact of the research and reach broader communities. It helps facilitate collaborations, not just with researchers in your own area of research, but across disciplines as well. And very importantly, it helps improve the reproducibility and the reusability of the data. As researchers, we know that it can be a lot of effort and time to generate data. And so really this allows you to get more use out of that data, not just you, but others as well, really extending the usability of the data and getting as much out of it as you can. Finally, there are many requirements now from funders and publishers requiring that data sets be shared. So by engaging in these practices, you will be better prepared to satisfy those requirements as well. Next slide, please. Within university libraries, we have the Open Science and Data Collaborations program. And our goal is really to help support you with your open research practices from the very beginning of a project when you're just starting to plan it all the way to the end when you might be thinking about publication or sharing products. We provide a support in a number of ways. We license a handful of digital tools that can be used for data management. We have training such as workshops and other instruction. All of this is on our website listed here. We host a couple of conferences each year where we talk about different topics in Open Science. And we have subject experts on hand for one-on-one consultations to help you get started or improve your open practices. Next slide, please. I'm just going to talk very briefly about these tools we just mentioned. Again, these are in essence data management tools. So they are really useful for all of the things that Kanna was just talking about. But they're also very useful for collaboration. Would be really good for group projects. Open Science Framework is a web platform that allows you to organize all of the files that are part of a research project in one place. It allows you to link to other popular platforms such as GitHub and Google Drive, for example. Protocols.io is a platform for recording and sharing detailed up-to-date methodologies. It works really well for any workflow that has a step-by-step organization. So lab protocols, computational pipelines, or even methods in humanities and social sciences. And then Lab Archives is an example of a digital research notebook that Kanna mentioned. So this is, again, very useful for storing data and analysis files in the cloud. You can also put all of your notes in there similar to the way that you would put them in a paper notebook. And again, these tools will not necessarily be appropriate for all projects. They include sensitive data. They might not work for you. So you can reach out to us if you have any questions about what would be right for your project. Next slide, please. There are many ways that you can get started with these tools or services. We will be in a breakout room after this event. Rachel, Hannah and I, to answer questions, chat with you. We can show you sample projects for these tools. You can email us for a virtual consultation at data at cmu.libanswers.com. And you can also visit our Open Science and Data Collaborations webpage, which has links to all of these tools and very detailed information about how to get started with them. Thank you. Thank you so much, Melanie, Hannah and Rachel, for the wonderful presentations that you provided. I saw things in the chat where people are going to be wanting to contact you about the information you provided in the future. And now, I am honored and delighted to introduce our second special guest speaker, Thomas Longstaff, SEI's Chief Technology Officer. As CTO, Tom is responsible for formulating a technical strategy and leading the funded research program of the Institute based on current and predicted future trends in technology, government and industry. Tom rejoined the SEI as CTO in 2018 after 10 years in a variety of senior roles at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and National Security Agency in Maryland. In Tom's prior role at the SEI, he was one of the early members of the CERT organization, developing many of the institutional groups still in place today. Tom received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Davis in 1992 and now lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Andy. He has two sons, one grandson, four years old and is grateful everyone is healthy and thriving. The title of Tom's presentation for this afternoon is Collaboration in the New Normal. And now please join me in welcoming Tom Longstaff. Well, hi everybody. I'm really glad you all are here and sort of, you know, stuck around to hear this talk. You know, wish we could all be together in person. Maybe someday I hope that we can have some of these sessions in person again. But one of the things I do want to talk about is I don't think things are ever going to be back exactly the way they were before. So there is going to be a new normal. And I'm going to pick up on what Keith said there. There's opportunity in our experience over the past year and our experience over the way things have gone. Next slide, please. So what I want to do is I want to talk a little bit about the journey that we've all been on over the past 12, 13 months through the pandemic and how our nature of collaboration with each other has changed. How our work has changed. How we've evolved over this time period in a very positive and sort of interesting way. And then at the end of this sort of bring it back to what does this mean for the future going forward? What does this mean for inclusivity? And maybe what does it even mean for libraries in the future and things that we may want to go. So I'm going to, if this works well and Shay we'll see if this goes okay. Let's click on the first bubble and we'll zip in. So remember way back when at the SEI Skype was our life and Skype was what we used for almost everything. And if you really remember back toward the beginning of this back in April of 2020, this is kind of what the town halls look like. Please click in. Well, good afternoon to everybody. It's nice to have the SEI family back together again. I certainly would really rather prefer it to be with a certain person in Jordan with some nice party afterwards like we usually do. But the situation is a little different today. So, but I'm still glad that we got able to talk to you today and reach out to all of you who've been working at home in isolation from each other. So that was using Skype for our way of doing collaboration for our ways of getting together. Basically, we had to go Skype through a series of technologies to go out to the broadcast media that we were sort of used to doing when we were broadcasting this from Jordan Auditorium. You'll notice that we're all a little clumsy in here. We're not sort of used to doing these sort of remote calls, especially not to the whole SEI. And question and answers were also very clumsy. They were sort of sent in through a variety of methods and Dave kind of got them an email trying to find some things and try to answer them. Not very collaborative, not a very good environment for really what we're trying to achieve. So let's click through. So we started to use the existing tools better. So we moved from Skype to Zoom. So we moved from sort of the kinds of backgrounds we used to have to the more virtual backgrounds. If you all would recognize that I'm even using one of the Zoom virtual backgrounds right now, which is my office, which actually looks better than my real office right now, which has a ceiling leak where water is coming down and apparently one of the ceiling panels has fallen. So my office doesn't quite look like this at the moment. But notice that it's a little more realistic. It's a little more immersive. It still has some quirks and things here and there. But I think we've all sort of recognized that Zoom is a better environment for collaboration. It's more immersive. It's better for us to sort of be here. And in particular, with the ability to use better virtual backgrounds in sort of better ways, it helps to allow us to present a view of ourselves that we want to have during collaboration. We know a lot about the people we're talking to by the situation that they're in, by the background that they have. And Zoom allowed some of us to say, we can optimize the look that we want to have during collaboration and being able to get in together and utilizing these tools even better with each other. So that was the nature of moving forward. Go ahead and click through. But Zoom in the way that it first started didn't look like me in the way I'm lighted right now at this moment. We had to go through some work in order to, even with the virtual backgrounds, cause us to look a little better in there. So click on this video. So this is what we did in preparation. Make sure you have all five latches unhitched. So you can go ahead and open it. Okay. Inside you will find two lights, two light stands and extension cord, the camera, the microphones, the Epithen I ABIO capture card and power adapters. Go ahead and just start taking stuff off. Okay. I'm going to start by removing the lights depending on your kit. You may have a different brand of lights. There will always be in a box or a soft bag and there are ways you can use this for each method. So just go ahead and reach into the kit. Hold on. There's one. You can notice right from the look there's the second one. Next, we're going to move the light stands. So just go ahead and grab each one of those. Then you can go ahead and grab that power adapter too while you're at it. It may or may not have the sleeves still depending on how abused it gets, but it should always be in that little center pocket. Great. So this was how we started to up our game with regard to the way that we looked and the way that we were able to interact using the zoom technology, using the lighting technology as best as we could. So we did some targeted investments. These flyaway packs you just saw were a shared resource that we sent to different people and had them send back. And only just recently, as many of you at the SEI know, we've actually allocated a fund to help everybody improve their home environment a little bit in order to improve the zoom experience. Go ahead forward. So that was using what we had, but then we started migrating to new tools and migrating to better ways that didn't just allow us to talk with each other, but we began to improve the collaboration that we would have. So this is how we changed out with the virtual town hall. So let's click into that video. So as we start, let me remind everybody that we've sort of changed technologies now. We're on zoom.gov doing this. And that means there's a few changes for all of you as well. Now you can ask questions as you had done in the past on the town hall alias. And we'll see those questions if you ask that way. But you can also ask questions through the Q&A part of zoom.gov. Not the chat part, but the Q&A part, which is also along the bottom row of the screens. So that gives you two different ways to ask questions. And we'll be monitoring both. I guess eventually we'll go over hardcore to the Q&A features of zoom.gov. But we know some people are still watching this on the live stream as opposed to on zoom.gov. So having said that, let me get started. We are about almost 200 people on right now. I know we'll have some more join us as we go. One of the first things I want to talk about is COVID. So as you can tell, this was really getting into the heart of sort of our work at home and getting better at understanding how we were going to do this work at home, how we were going to begin to move forward on this. You'll note that we're already moving toward a better sense of large scale collaboration with Q&A that's being answered in real time. And if any of you attended the recent town hall, you'll note that we've gotten pretty adept at answering questions as they come in, marking those, sending them through in the function using the zoom to our maximum advantage in this way. Go ahead and click forward. So we are migrating to even better solutions now. We've recently started to integrate Microsoft teams. And within teams, we still have this ability to chat and video chat with each other. But now we've got all of the additional collaboration tools that allow us to access files, modify files, work together on files at the same time, ad version control, add a lot of the things. Now this really is a shift in the way we work. It's not just about replacing the telephone with the video with a zoom with backgrounds. It really is starting to say how can we begin to develop intellectual content and develop materials better together. And I think this is actually a huge step forward in the way that we've all started working. And this is one of the new normals that I doubt we will ever leave even when we're back in the office. There's a tremendous advantage to creating even presentations like this one and having them up and be modified in real time by multiple people without having to worry about sending files around and versioning them and all of these various things. I know that many of you probably have dozens of versions of previous presentations on your laptop. And you don't really know if that's the latest one or if somebody else has the latest one. You know, stored in their space coming into here. So with teams we've got a better way of going forward with this and I'm just myself beginning to incorporate this into all of the work of the CTO's office. But I'm excited about where this is leading to now. Go ahead and click forward. But we're not done. So these were migrating to some of the new tools, but that has left me really wondering what comes next. How can we begin to go from staring through a pane of glass at information, staring through very small windows and seeing headshots of the people I'm talking to, to begin to create a more collaborative work environment that isn't restricted to just simply editing a document together or just looking at us facing a small pane of glass. And part of this is, you know, we've learned over the course of COVID that this way of working, which is really productive in some ways is exhausting in others. I'm sure like many of you, if I sit in the same chair staring at the same nine inches for several hours in a row, I can't move after that. I can't even get up. Perhaps I'm showing my age a little bit, but I can't get up and move. And it's really one of these areas that says, this is hard to do everything through a pane of glass. So how can we be more immersive? How can we begin to bring in the nonverbal cues and the body language and the spatial audio? Go ahead and click forward. Where are we going to take our cues from this? Let's look at immersive environments. Where would we see those now? So I was excited to hear that one of the things we're going to start to see is some of the library science support through the vision of video games. Pulling on that theme, where do we see the most immersive environments today? Often, they have started in video games. And an interesting trend, not so much at the SEI, but elsewhere, has been meetings that are now taking place in shared gaming environments, where people can actually do sit around a virtual fire and talk about not the game, but the work they're actually doing to collaborate in a way that is sort of in a three-dimensional virtual environment. Now, there are drawbacks. You don't see the real person, you see their avatar. You're obviously looking at a fake environment, and this is clearly a game-style environment. And of course, you can pick up a virtual weapon and shoot your partner, which you wouldn't normally want to do in a collaborative environment. But let's take our cues from this. What do we get out of these immersive environments? We do get a sense of what the small, subtle activities are from each of the people that we're talking to. We get the ability to look around in three dimensions so that we can focus our attention in one area or another area. We can see that that attention is being focused. You can even look at an avatar and know where that avatar's attention is focused. That helps enormously to know whether the people in the room are hearing what you are saying, or whether they're concentrating on somebody else. Can't really get that from Zoom or the technologies that we have. So looking at these environments, even before the pandemic, I was trying to think about what would the future of software development and collaboration be like. And now, I'm really beginning to realize that these ideas of immersive environments are going to be spurred on by everything that we're doing with regard to our response in the pandemic. Picking up again from what Keith had said earlier, the idea that this pandemic has caused various technology areas to explode, this is one of them in the immersive work environments. Go ahead and click forward. So obviously, one of the reasons you do this is because some people don't like Zoom for doing some of this collaborative work, but go ahead and click forward. So work-related immersive environments, not gaming environments, I would say they're pretty nascent, and those of you that have tried it, things like Spatial IO and Bramble and Hubs, we've tried a number of these, and they're pretty clumsy. They begin to get at the idea of how do I get closer to my collaborators, and how do I begin to work together. But it really takes some of the more advanced office environments to start to have whiteboards and start to have interaction in a three-dimensional way that you would have it. So we're early on in these days in terms of coming into there. And one of the things that I would like to replicate is the idea that I have an office environment that people can come into, draw on my whiteboard, and then we all go away, but the whiteboard is maintained so that anybody who walks back into the room can see what we drew up on the whiteboard and drew up on what was there. Very valuable kinds of very small, subtle things. Go ahead, go forward. And we are already here in some ways. So some of the work that we've been doing for the President's Cup for DHS has already begun to expand those virtual environments using gaming engines and gaming technologies to do real cyber security work, in this case, really doing contests and doing it, but with real virtual machines solving real security problems. Go ahead and click into the video. It's a found circuit breaker. It looks like sparks are flying. Round one, we go back to round one. There were 15 challenges that were mapped to the nice framework. Audience, if you're not familiar with a nice framework, what's the initiative for cyber security education? It's really a partnership. That is fast paced. It's moving around a lot, but what's really happening is people aren't talking about the game. They're not talking about the immersive environment. They're talking about the cyber security challenge as they're going through and trying to solve this in each one of the locations. So we're starting to build on environments like that to say, is this a way that future work might look? Go ahead and click forward. So let's go from there the immersive environments to what else is out there once we have the immersive environment. So if that represents the direction that we're going, what are we missing? Well, what are we missing? First of all, we're still avatar based. We're not seeing expressions. We're not really seeing body language. We're not having those informal side conversations. You know, if we were all in person and this session were happening in person, 10 minutes before this session started, I would have been talking to people at tables. We would have been informally talking about things. When this session ends, we would be informally thinking about what's going on. We would be making those personal connections that is so difficult to make in a professional zoom style environment. And, you know, finally, what are we missing when we're at work? Often, and, you know, this is really important. We make a friend. We use these side conversations to really understand each other better. And that is so difficult in an environment where you presume you already know the person at the beginning of the Zoom meeting, so you can pretty much get right to work. Maybe a little bit of chit-chat or small talk. But it's so different than being at a coffee pot. It is so different than meeting each other in the hallway, getting to know each other, and really being able to understand where we come from. And this extends all the way down to how can we work in a comfortable, collaborative, welcoming, inclusive, and sensitive environment. And if this all sounds familiar, this is beginning to get to where our diversity, equity, and inclusion goals are and where the goals that we have in the future in terms of being inclusive and what we're trying to do. So go forward one more. So this really ties into where I think the DE and I goals are bringing us and driving this nature of a virtual environment. What do we want? We want an environment that we can all be in, see the entire surroundings, and feel that it's welcoming to everybody who is there. I'm sure we've all had the experience occasionally of going into a Zoom meeting and seeing somebody's background and going, whoa, I didn't know they lifted a situation like that. I mean, whether that's because it's opulent or whether it's because it's not what you would have expected or because it's got dogs running around in backgrounds or craziness going on all over the place. I haven't heard a dog bark yet today, that's unusual. You know, these are things that make the environment less safe for someone to want to jump in and sort of bring their authentic self to a meeting. Where do we see that? Where do we see an environment that we would like to be in to collaborate in an environment that's sort of safe and welcoming for everybody but in a professional collaborative way that we can work? You know what occurs to me first? Libraries. The ability to go to a library space. The ability to be in that space together with a number of people to work in the midst of a lot of information. An entire set of scholarly information right at my fingertips in the library with the people that I want to collaborate with, with my own notebooks and tools to take notes, with the ability to capture new information, generate new material, trust each other and more importantly, really understand and see the interactions that we have with each other. I think this is indicated of the next wave of our work environments that are going to move forward even beyond the pandemic. And how will we develop software in the DoD? How will we collaborate across the country and continents in order to bring together people to develop new work in new collaborative ways that are culturally inclusive from people all around the world? I think it's going to be through these innovative virtual library environments that we can be in in a three-dimensional space where our entire self is represented, our facial expressions are there and we can begin to create a new way of doing work that doesn't stare through 9 inches of glass all the time. And that's where I want to leave it in terms of, you know, imagine a world in which that would happen. A world in which that is going to be our common work environment where we can reach out to not only knowledge but people and do that collaboration and sort of work in the future. If you've really liked the way these charts and things have worked, shout out for sure to Rodham Gutman who helped me really, really put this together for me and really put this more innovative way of showing it through Zoom in the video clips. I'm really enamored by where this technology is going and sort of where things are happening. Go ahead to the next slide. And so with that, I'm going to close and answer whatever questions I can pick up from all of you. I'll be around for a bit. And up next, we have an overview of the Software Engineering Institute's internship program. So I'm going to turn it over to Lindsay Mercer. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Tom. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining. My name is Lindsay Mercer, and I'm a talent acquisition specialist at the Software Engineering Institute. I have the opportunity to recruit for our operational talent and our technical talent as well as running our internship program. So I have the pleasure to partner with each technical division at the Software Engineering Institute to hire the best and brightest interns every year. So we look for undergraduate, graduate, or PhD students all spring and summer semesters. So as you can imagine, our internships have looked a little differently during COVID. We have been hosting our interns virtually since March of last year. So right now, we are currently in our summer hiring stage looking for summer interns to join us for the summer of 2021, beginning in May, on a remote basis still. So this summer, we're looking to hire about 30 or 40 interns who have specialized in a wider array of areas. Some of those areas are cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, risk and resilience management, machine learning, quantum computing, software engineering, and so much more. So at the Software Engineering Institute, our interns have the opportunity to do real work where they're writing code, they're analyzing data, and they're collaborating as valuable members of the team. So this summer, we're actually piloting a new program called the 8 and 4 program. So this program is going to give our interns the opportunity to have a real tangible project that they're able to add to their resume as they're moving forward and looking for full-time opportunities. So during the first eight weeks of their internship, the intern is going to work on manager assigned projects, and during the last four weeks, the intern is going to have the opportunity to create a program in which this could be an array of projects, whether it's a research paper, a project that they could change the SEI for the better, maybe it's creating a plugin or a tool for something we already have. The opportunities are truly endless here. As you can see at the bottom of the slide here, we have our SEI internship requirements. So they are, we must be available for 12 weeks consecutively to be an intern since we are a DOD affiliated organization. US citizenship is required for all of our technical roles and internships and then while you intern with us, you must be enrolled in a degree granting program. If we could go to the next slide, I will direct you to a few different ways that interns can apply to our program. Please check out our postings on Handshake, our career site, LinkedIn. Always please feel free to reach out to us or if you want me to check out your resume. I will also be joining the internship breakout room if you would like to chat further or if you have any other questions for me that you would like to ask. So that's all I have for everyone today. I would love to see everyone at the internship breakout room here after this. Next up looks like we have an interview session with some of our interns. We have a very long discussion entitled SEI internship program. Advantage to participation and the impact of COVID-19. So the presentation will be moderated by Dan Costa, technical manager, enterprise threat and vulnerability management at the SEI. With participation from SEI interns, Samantha Chaves of the CERT division, Austin Vershaw of the CERT division and Jacob Oaks of the Emerging Technology Center. Good afternoon again. Good afternoon, everybody. Samantha, Jacob, Austin, good afternoon. Good afternoon. I would like to get started with just a little bit of your background and kind of how you came to the SEI in the first place. I would like each of you to give us just a little bit on how you all became aware of the SEI internship program and also a little bit on how you applied. I'm sure there was no shortage of opportunities for you out there when it came time to find an internship and really interested in what drew you to the particular position you applied in. Austin, would you like to get us started? For sure. So how it became aware of the SEI internship is actually my professor at Lewis University, Professor Tom Podner. It was a great opportunity for me to be internship opportunities and I hopped on board. It was a great opportunity for myself to actually work with the SEI. What drew me in was I really wanted to grow not only computer security but to grow as a team member. To be a part of a bigger team and be part of projects where I can actually deliver to a customer. So I actually just started grad school. Last semester was my first semester and I'm a part of a program called Scholarship for Service. I'm not sure if anyone is familiar with it. So essentially they encourage students to seek out an internship with the government whether that was a federal agency, FFRDC and so the persons in charge of the program at our school encouraged us also to attend a job fair which was January in DC. So I went around looking at all the different FFRDCs because a lot of students had received internships from them and so one person who actually went to my school was actually employed with Carnegie and she told me, hey why don't you go check out our booth and so I did and I found that there were many opportunities to expand with cyber security so I ended up applying and I actually got offered there at the job fair so it was quite, it was quite exciting. That's one successful job fair, that's for sure to me. Yes. Okay, Jacob, next up how did you become aware of the SEI internship program and what are you to apply? Well, it's slightly less glamorous. I basically Googled computer science internships and applied to everything I could find but I can tell you what drew me to take the SEI position was just the actual work that was being done seemed super interesting and like Lindsay said, we do real work that actually gets applied and that makes me feel good as an intern and also just the flexibility that was offered. As a full-time student I have classes and homework and things I need to do and I was assured time and time again that I can take time off if I need to do that and sort of work around my schedule. So mainly those things. That's great, thank you all for sharing. Jacob, maybe you'd like to just circle right back with a follow-up question. You talked about kind of the opportunity to do real work within the internship program. Could you give us a little bit on kind of what that work is and what some more of the some of the more challenging aspects of that work is for you in the ETC? Yeah, so I'll talk more about the challenges. When I first started the internship I had basically no knowledge of anything machine learning related. So I was coming in as a blank slate for ML, which nearly all the work in the ETC is ML related. So the biggest challenge for me was getting up to speed. You know, implied in the name emerging technology is this idea you sort of need to have some sort of prowess to really fundamentally understand what's going on. So there's a lot of reading, a lot of talking with your collaborators and your mentors. It's definitely been rewarding. Every day I understand a little bit more of what's going on in the projects and I'm really glad that I actually had gone through all that. It's been extremely rewarding. One of the really nice things about the SCI Internship program is the ability to pick up new skills on the job. So you mentioned this, what we're really looking for aren't necessarily kind of fully grown subject matter experts in a field but folks that exhibit the characteristics that are indicative of folks that can pick up those skills and rapidly apply them to emerging customer challenges. It's a real hallmark of a lot of the internship experiences I've had the pleasure of being involved with during my time here at the SCI. I want to shift gears a little bit slightly, but stay focused on the work back with a question to Samantha. Can you talk to us about some of the more rewarding parts of the work that you do here at the SIRT monitoring and response team? Yeah, of course. So I guess based off Jacob's response definitely having my work being used by the team it's rewarding to know that the hours that us interns put in on the platform insight, which is the team I'm on it's actually beneficial to the team, you know, whether all the research we're doing, development, it's helpful. Granted, the members of the team they have clearances so it's kind of hard to say, you know, for interns to know exactly what they do day to day and how they use their work but they're always communicating with us telling us that our work is extremely helpful and applicable to things that they're doing internally in the office so that's extremely rewarding knowing that. It's a great point and that feedback is not only helpful at kind of keeping you engaged with the team that you're supporting but it's also necessary resume fodder, right? We've got to be able to contextualize the knowledge, the skills, and experiences that you're picking up and to be able to focus on the impact of the work that you're providing. Samantha, you mentioned kind of a unique challenge around kind of there being this tiny little issue of a classification of security clearance kind of in the way of being able to know the full scale and scope of the problem but there are ways that those processes can still be instrumented so that you can know whether or not what you're doing is providing value or is being effective so that's great. Austin, what did a shift back to you as well you are unique in terms of our panelists in that you've been through the SAI internship experience to come out the other end a full-fledged member of the technical staff here at the SAI so walk us through walk us through what that transition was like and why you chose to stay. So the transition is pretty seamless actually you know you continue working on the same amount of work that you're working as an intern and talking about the work you know all the work at the SAI is very engaging you learn something new every single day for working at the SAI but the reason why I chose the SAI to, sorry to become a member of the SAI are the people you know the RSS team at the Cyber Workforce Development who those people are the ones that drew me in takes a lot of teamwork in order to accomplish a goal you know and everyone in CWD insert in SAI in a whole they're all a part of a greater goal and I'm gladly appreciated that I am a part of the SAI in accomplishing the same goals. Excellent I want to follow up on kind of the second part of the thing that we had in the title for this panel which is the kind of the impact of the pandemic on your internship experience so I'm curious to hear from you all about what changed or what has had to change relative to kind of how you work how you collaborate with the teams what's been different what's been easier or harder to do kind of in this remote posture that we find ourselves in or just anything else that you've got in terms of you know how the pandemic has affected kind of your internship experience positively or negatively I could go first if you guys don't have anything yet so I mean obviously with COVID you know there's going to be pros and cons to working remotely but for me more pros outweigh the cons but just the con which is probably going to be the same for everyone there is no face to face interaction physically being in the office which sometimes it is difficult for interns because you can't just walk over next door and ask hey can you help me with something so I mean thankfully my team was very responsive to emails we set meetings aside outside of internal meetings just for intern work and if you had any questions they were able to get those solved definitely the flexibility so as I had mentioned I'm in graduate school currently and I'm just doing the internship part time so this internship program actually allowed me to balance both extremely well I didn't have to worry about running from class and then driving all the way to work so just simple stuff like that's actually been pretty pretty easy and also the manager is super flexible with ours so if interns have any conflicts with like school deadlines and tests and stuff like that they always say take care of school first so they're extremely understanding to the situation and they always make the best of it I would say sorry to interrupt him but that's a huge pro for me too is the flexibility you know just like Samantha I'm a student so there's a lot to sort of balance sometimes and not having to walk between or drive between anything is super nice and also I think over over time I've been an intern for a little bit over a year here most of it has been remote the teams have gotten better and better at communicating and I would actually wager to say that I communicate more now than I did before he went remote which is interesting and kind of doesn't seem like it makes sense but I feel very supported and I think the SCI has done a great job doing that for their interns Austin I'd like to kind of shift the question a little bit for you slightly you got the experience of having gone through the internship program pre-pandemic and curious to get your thoughts on kind of you know what's changed from how you work kind of from this time last year to now yeah so honestly the only thing that's really changed from the actual work environment is just being able to work from home and like they said previous two interns said it's extremely flexible but honestly the thing I miss the most is the informal discussions going out to lunch with your team and kind of like the networking that's all involved with your internship pre-COVID now after COVID we did have some sort of networking program within the internship but it just didn't feel the same as you know going with your team lunch and kind of discussing like your work day and you know everything else is happening at work great thank you for that okay let's bring this one in for a landing here folks this is for each of you what advice would you have to someone who's either interested in an internship here at the SEI or someone who is about to start an internship here at the SEI? Samantha you want to take that one first? Sure so my response will probably pertain more to students maybe who have never worked before because this is actually my first job out in industry since interns get paid and I'm not even alive I was extremely nervous when just thinking about applying to jobs that have always been focused on school so my advice would honestly be just to come in with an open mind don't be afraid to try it out I know personally I felt maybe out of my comfort zone since I had never worked or I just felt I wasn't qualified for a position based on my past experience so again when I came onto the team there was multiple interns with vast backgrounds so we had a mathematician at one point and then we had a person majoring in management information systems so again don't think that you might need some specific technical skills or something like that to be able to apply for an internship again it's a learning experience for anyone they all want you to learn, succeed and most importantly work on stuff that you're interested in so if you are interested give it a shot and just see where it goes great advice Samantha Jacob you want to go next? yeah so kind of building off of what Samantha just said I would say my biggest piece of advice is don't be afraid to ask questions when I first started there was sort of this mental block that was telling me sometimes oh that's a dumb question you're kind of wasting their time but that's just not true at all asking questions is what's expected of you as an intern and it's how you really graduate beyond that intern level you're not expected to know everything when you start as an intern or probably ever really so just don't be afraid to ask questions you know it's helpful for you and it's helpful even for the person that you're asking to sort of explain it through in their own head too so that'd be my biggest piece of advice tremendous Austin what advice do you have for prospective interns or folks that are going to be joining us in the spring? so my advice and this is exactly how I led my internship was treat every day like an interview every single day you walk into that office you have to put a great smile on and make sure you put your head down and work and you know you just have to you have to put in the time and the effort in order to receive the information gathered from your internship wonderful well I'd like to thank all three of you for participating in the panel Tom, Lindsay and I could stand up here for the full hour and 30 minutes and talk about how great we think the SCI is and working at the SCI but to hear it from folks that are kind of going through the internship program and folks that have graduated from the internship program really does go to highlight kind of what some of the uniqueness is of working with and for the SCI are both as an intern as a full-time employee so certainly want to thank all three of you for your inputs your thoughts your ideas and even your advice there at the end back to you Shannon thank you Dan and everyone I agree with everything that Dan said about the interns and everybody who presented today just did a wonderful job and on behalf of Carnegie Mellon University libraries and research services we're very grateful for your participation and now it's time for you to join our two breakout rooms one is SCI internship discover more about an internship at the SCI discussion led by Dan Costa, Lindsay Mercer Michelle Tomasic and Cameron Mitchell or CMU library slash research services librarians learn more about the university libraries and SCI research services discussions led by Hannah Gunderman Melanie Gangie and Rachel Collison and thank you all so much for attending innovation roundtable 2021