Personalised health is a research focus at ETH Zurich and requires special data and IT infrastructures as well as special IT services. These ones are intended to support and combine the three main ideas: security and compliance to protect experimentees' privacy; scalability and performance; and flexibility and ease of use to promote cutting-edge biomedical research.

Leonhard Med is a new data and computing platform for research on confidential data. It is operated by Scientific IT Services at ETH Zurich. Leonhard Med offers a powerful research IT platform to securely store, manage and process confidential research data (e.g. patient data) and support data-driven biomedical research.

Leonhard Med for data-driven precision medicine and personalised health research

Leonhard Med enables collaborative, large-scale and very diverse biomedical research (including academies and hospitals) at ETH Zurich. Furthermore, Leonhard Med is part of the national BioMedIT network of secure data centres that supports projects in the Swiss Personalized Health Network. This puts ETH Zurich in the leading position on a national and international level as the computer centre for projects with confidential research data, while also making it possible to teach students as part of such projects.

You can read when secure data and IT infrastructures should be used and how to know whether data is confidential in the ITS Blog.

Dr Bernd Rinn, Head of Scientific IT Services (ITS SIS)
Dr Diana Coman Schmid, Personalised Health Data Services Manager (ITS SIS)

 

The digital HDMI connection has just replaced the analogue VGA as the standard for connecting computers with projectors or monitors. And now, the next innovation is already finding its home: with wireless content transmission, Multimedia Services now offers a more convenient and flexible solution that is also great for group collaboration.

The HDMI digital interface is available in all lecture halls and seminar rooms and will replace the VGA signal. But now HDMI is facing the same fate, because for some time now, a wireless and therefore more convenient solution has been available: with Solstice, computers and other mobile devices can establish a wireless connection to a projector or monitor, regardless of the operating system. The audio signal can also be transmitted via this interface in addition to all visual content. Similarly to Wi-Fi, the flexibility of this makes up for smaller drawbacks (such as decreased bandwidth or increased latency). This is especially true as Solstice allows parallel access by several people or devices, making collaborative work much easier: switching or replugging and the resulting problems are now things of the past. Since 2019, Solstice has been available on configured computers for ETH members and can be downloaded as an app from Google and Apple. More information can be found in the ITS Blog.

Tom Rechsteiner, Group Manager for Videoconferencing & Collaboration (ITS MMS)

 

As part of an extraordinarily complex project, the new Identity and Access Management System (IAM) of ETH Zurich was introduced in mid-April 2019. It is based on the off-the-shelf software suite DirX from Atos. The introduction of the system delivers modern user and authorisation management and ensures legal compliance for IAM processes. This replaces the previous nethz application.

The new IAM system is capable of integrating the identities from other, external source systems, linking them with decentralised assignment of rights and supporting the transfer of in-house identities to external systems. The new solution is also capable of ensuring architecturally consistent and efficient collaboration with the new ITSM system. The service management features, which are currently still available in the old nethz admin client, are reimplemented in ITSM.

The IAM project has proven to be extremely complex and faced many technical difficulties and data corrections. The first weeks of productive operation saw numerous intricate problems and support requests. After a phase of stabilisation and consolidation, ergonomic improvement of the web application and its functional extensions will be discussed with the IT support groups. More about the new ETH user account and the tutorials on the Web.

Dr Giorgio Broggi, Head of Software Services (ITS SWS)
Davor Kupresak, Service Owner for IAM (ITS SWS)

 

Join us on a journey through time. This device was discovered years ago by Daniel Locher, employee of ITS Server, IT Services. He was in a warehouse of the computer centre in the RZ building.

Take a guess and discover more about the IT Find.