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Dear Reader,
In this new year, we are pleased to welcome our Educational IT Services (EduIT) colleagues to IT Services. The team is moving from the Rectorate to us. Get to know EduIT and its portfolio for education and teaching.
It's not just organisational changes that are happening in the new year, however. We are also starting the year with some technical innovations. The PREMISE project will facilitate the use of work practices in materials science that follow the Open Research Data (ORD) and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reproducible) principles. Read how our Scientific IT Services (ITS SIS), together with other teams from the ETH section, are creating new opportunities here.
We will also be implementing some changes in the Wi-Fi environment that affect large parts of ETH and are challenging in terms of communication. With this changeover, we will better separate the public Wi-Fi from the ETH network and remove the distinction between the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
Look forward to these and other topics in the first inside|out of 2024!
Kind regards,
Dr Rui Brandao
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| The ITS EduIT management team: Tobias Halbherr, Flavio Steger, Samuel Witzig, Kristina Isacson and Thomas Piendl (from left) with a 360° perspective on IT in teaching and learning |
Who and what is EduIT? |
"IT in teaching and learning": Welcome to IT Services! With the newly founded Educational IT Services division, ITS supports innovative teaching at ETH Zurich with a well-balanced portfolio of tools, services and support. As part of the dissolution of the administrative department LET (Educational Development and Technology) within the Rector's section at the end of 2023, the "IT Services" group and employees from the "Testing & Evaluation" group were combined to form the new "EduIT" division and have been integrated into ITS since the beginning of 2024.
The portfolio of the EduIT division offers lecturers and students tools for the entire didactic practice of higher education: starting with the learning objectives, to the design of learning activities, teaching, examinations and evaluation.
Our portfolio includes: |
| • | | the operation and further development of Moodle, ETH's central Learning Management System |
| • | | EduApp, a smartphone application to promote interaction in face-to-face lessons |
| • | | the operation and further development of interdisciplinary, subject-specific learning and examination environments |
| • | | supervision and support of various digital examination scenarios |
| • | | specific software development in the field of higher education |
| • | | student evaluation of courses and examinations |
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Further and detailed information on the groups "Educational Systems Engineering", "Digital Education Services", "Educational Software Engineering" and their products and services can be found here: Applications and Services in Support of Teaching and Learning.
Dr Thomas Piendl, Head of Educational IT Services (ITS EduIT)
Samuel Witzig, Deputy Head of Educational IT Services (ITS EduIT) |
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| Informatiktage Open Day 2024 |
| Come and visit us on Saturday, 23 March 2024 in the ETH building CAB. Discover the multifaceted world of computer science and immerse yourself in the highly topical issues of IT security. ITS and the Department of Computer Science (D-INFK) represent ETH Zurich and will be offering programmes for young and old from 18 March to 23 March 2024. All are welcome! |
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| WLAN – it doesn't work without cables after all... Stephan Walder, Thomas Lier, Afrim Bislimi (from left), all ITS INFRA, provide ETH members and visitors with secure and stable access to the Internet |
Project WLAN migration 2024 |
The ITS INFRA division is managing a project to migrate the WLAN at ETH Zurich and fulfil the audit requirements. The aim is to separate the public WLAN from the ETH network and rename the SSID from "public" to "eth-visitors". An information campaign will follow to inform first-semester students to use the SSID "eduroam" as the first choice for WLAN.
The Data Networks division of ITS INFRA manages 6,750 WLAN access points in 160 buildings at ETH Zurich. At peak times, around 30,000 clients are online. Following the last audit by the ETH Board, the requirement was issued to separate the public WLAN from the ETH network (currently known as "public" or "public-5"). A project for the WLAN migration 2024 has been launched, which will isolate the public WLAN from the ETH network by the start of the autumn semester (mid-September 2024) and change the name of the SSID from "public" to "eth-visitors". At the same time, the distinction between the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands will be removed.
An information campaign will also be launched to inform first-semester students to use the SSID "eduroam" for WLAN access preferably. This will allow them to access the EduApp as well as all ETH resources. All information on WLAN at ETH Zurich can be found in the IT Knowledge Base (later on, also updates regarding the project).
Dr Armin Wittmann, Head of Infrastructure (ITS INFRA)
Stephan Walder, Group Head Data Networks (ITS INFRA)
Domenica Wieghardt, Project Manager (ITS CCR) |
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| Migration of emails to the cloud |
| The IT Services email service includes a wide range of services. It currently maintains its own infrastructure (Microsoft Exchange 2016) for this purpose. However, Exchange 2016 has not been further developed since October 2020 (end-of-life), and support will be discontinued on 14 October 2025. The hardware infrastructure is also outdated and needs to be completely replaced. In January 2023, the Executive Board decided to migrate the existing mail infrastructure to Microsoft Office 365. The migration will provide users with a larger mailbox, an intelligent spam filter and a modern web client. Existing clients can continue to be used without any changes. ETH members will be informed by email of the documentation and the migration date, approximately one month before the email migration. |
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| Danaila Mihai-Cosmin, Caterina Barillari and Bernd Rinn (from left), all ITS SIS, work with researchers in PREMISE on seamlessly linking experimental and simulation data in order to advance autonomous laboratories and accelerate and optimise research and development processes |
PREMISE: Open and Reproducible Materials Science Research |
PREMISE aims to establish, promote and facilitate the adoption of FAIR ORD practices in Materials Science, focusing on enabling the treatment of experimental and simulation data at the same level. This will be achieved by enabling seamless integration between Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN), storing experimental details and data, and workflow management systems (WFMS) used for running simulations. As a proof of concept, the openBIS ELN and data management system, developed by ITS SIS, and the WFMS AiiDA / AiiDAlab developed at PSI and Empa will be used. The achievements of this project will be an essential component of the emerging field of autonomous laboratories, where automated simulations and robotic experiments are combined via artificial intelligence in closed feedback loops, ultimately accelerating materials discovery and characterization.
PREMISE is an "Establish" research project funded by the ETH ORD Domain program and run by PSI, Empa and ITS SIS (ETH) as project partners.
One part of the project focuses on enabling interoperability between data from experiments and data from simulations, focusing on the fields of microscopy and spectroscopy. Experimental procedures and related data are usually described and stored in ELNs. These data can be used to run simulations using WFMS, the results of which can drive further experiments. Interoperability between ELNs and WFMS is key to streamline and automate this process.
Another focus area of the project is the integration of WFMS-driven robotic experimental setups with an ELN, driving automated experiments and tracking them via digital twins. As a proof of concept, the full automation cycle will be implemented in the Empa’s robotic battery cell assembly lab.
The project uses the openBIS ELN and the WFMS AiiDA / AiiDAlab as proof of concept. Both tools are widely used in the ETH Domain and beyond, in the field of material sciences. However, the integration between the two platforms will be developed and documented in such a way that it could be applied to any other ELN and WFMS.
Dr Bernd Rinn, Head of Scientific IT Services (ITS SIS)
Dr Caterina Barillari, Research Data Manager (ITS SIS)
Mihai-Cosmin Danaila, Software Engineer (ITS SIS) |
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| MFA – register and log in securely |
| Multifactor authentication (MFA) has now been extended to include the use of VPNs, in order to increase the protection of your data and identities against cyber attacks. If you wish to connect to the ETH network via VPN in the future, you will be asked to enter a second login confirmation. You generate this second factor on your Authenticator app as a one-time password (OTP). The following point should be noted: when logging into the VPN, enter your one-time password in the "Second Password" field. |
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| Learn more about this IT find |
Join us on a journey through time. This old ETH telephone was saved from disposal by an ITS employee. Take a guess and discover more about this IT find.
Question: what was the number for getting information at ETH until 1993? |
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| Who counts as a guest? |
| The guest project that has been introduced has created criteria that differentiate guests from employees. In order to be granted access and/or admission to the ETH infrastructure (buildings/systems/data), the requirements of one of the guest categories defined in the guest rules must be met. |
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| Unified Communication (UC) |
| The softphone (UC) is the standard telephone at ETH Zurich and is already used by more than 2,000 employees. All new employees receive it when they join ETH. We are asking everyone to switch to the new type of telephone quickly and simply, so they can, for example, be reached with the landline telephone number when working from home. |
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| PolyMaps wins GIS Excellence Award from Esri Schweiz |
| Further milestones have been reached in relation to technical innovations in the "Barrier-free" programme. Automatic subtitles for lecture recordings are now available for the first time, and the PolyMaps app, which enables users to navigate and position themselves at ETH without barriers to accessibility, wins the GIS Excellence Award 2023 from Esri Schweiz. |
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| End of availability of the provisioning app in Teams |
| The provisioning app for the Microsoft Teams client will no longer be available as of 31 March 2024. By clicking on the "three dots" in the left-hand navigation bar of Teams, you could previously search for and open the provisioning app. The app made it possible to create new teams and enable appropriate use and collaboration with Microsoft Teams (internally and externally). With the help of predefined templates, the app allowed members to be added quickly and easily. In future, these steps can be carried out directly in Microsoft Teams – read the instructions on how to proceed. |
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