In lieu of a traditional poster session at CASTLE, IBM Advanced Studies is once again inviting teams to submit a brief video overviewing their research project. Each team is encouraged to submit either a new or updated video.

Videos will sit under project pages on the Advanced Studies website, and will be available for a public audience - including IBM management, IBM employees, students and the general Advanced Studies community - to learn from, view and share.

Submission requirements and instructions can be found here.

IBM Advanced Studies Video Award

All video submissions will be considered for the IBM Advanced Studies Video Award, which will be presented to the most outstanding research project video at CASCON x EVOKE 2021 in November.

Product Team Meetings

Please reach out to your RCL and schedule a meeting any time between 13:00 to 16:00 (EDT) on any day between May 10 - 14, 2021. To keep the Advanced Studies team in the loop, include Vio Onut, Tinny Ng and Maria Gallaher in any scheduled meetings.

Morning Meetings

The morning hour of CASTLE between 10:00 - 11:00 (EDT), consists of daily meetings on a variety of topics for a variety of audiences. Details will be sent via meeting invites.

1. Monday | CASTLE Opening Ceremony & Video Review
   
   

   Every year, CASTLE convenes and connects the IBM Advanced Studies community on an annual basis to exchange knowledge, share feedback, match grant application opportunities and foster cross-project collaboration. Join us as we kick off CASTLE 2021, prepare for the week ahead, hear from leadership and touch base with our faculty, students and IBM product teams. This session will also feature a discussion on the IBM Advanced Studies Video Awards and the value of improving the digital footprint of our research projects.

2. Tuesday | Improving CAS Together
   
   

   IBM Advanced Studies and faculty across Canada have a longstanding relationship in delivering research and innovation that is meaningful to both academia and industry. How can we support one another in expanding research, improving processes, sharing accomplishments, contributing to events and driving academic success? Join us for a panel discussion with professors about their experiences working with Advanced Studies, followed by an open conversation on how we can work better together.

   • Marin Litoiu, Professor, York University
   • Kenneth Kent, Professor, University of New Brunswick
   • Andriy Miranskyy, Professor, Ryerson University
   
   
3. Wednesday | Advanced Studies for IBMers and IBM Interns
   
   

   Do you want to connect with the academic and research community at IBM? Are you interested in graduate studies? Come learn what the IBM Advanced Studies team and community of students, faculty and product experts are up to. Find out how you can engage to enhance your IBM and academic journeys. Participants will gain insight into the student experience, ask questions and learn about pathways, capstone projects and future events.

4. Thursday | CAS ROI - Engaging Academia to Improve IBM products
   
   

   How can IBMers, Managers, Executives, STSMs, DEs, Architects and the Advanced Studies community work together to amplify academic-industry relationship, learn from our research, and deliver higher ROI? Join us for a panel discussion and Qamp;A on the benefits of contributing to Advanced Studies, project accomplishments and how product teams can engage academia to improve IBM products.

   • Allen Chan, Distinguished Engineer & CTO, Digital Business Automation
   • Mark Stoodley, STSM, Chief Architect for Java Runtimes
   • Joe Wigglesworth, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Spectrum Fusion Development
   • Calisto Zuzarte, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Analytics
   • Peter Mierzejewski, Director Development Db2 Distributed, Db2 Big Sql and Data Virtualization
   • Wang Chen, Senior Manager, Compiler Development
   • Anthony Renaud, Senior Manager, IBM Runtime Technologies
   
   
5. Friday | CASTLE Closing Ceremony & Advanced Studies is Listening
   

   Join faculty, students, product experts, researchers and leaders from the IBM Advanced Studies community as we celebrate our accomplishments, discuss the year ahead and close CASTLE 2021. Participants will also have the opportunity to sync up with the Advanced Studies team, connect with one another and share their thoughts and reflections.

Workshops

In gauging feedback and engagement from previous years, CASTLE 2021 will feature four technical workshops on various topics of interest everyday from 13:00 - 16:00 (EDT).

1. Monday | OpenShift in Practice
   
   

   Join Dewan Ahmed, Red Hat Software Engineer & Open-Source Developer Advocate, in a hands-on workshop on Red Hat OpenShift. Dewan has worked on DevOps and cloud technologies for the last 7 years at IBM & Red Hat - both in development and customer-facing roles. He will start from the absolute basics of containers, orchestration and cover the fundamentals of OpenShift. The second half of the workshop will cover hands-on exercises where attendees can see the value of OpenShift in solving real-world software problems.

   Having some level of knowledge about containers and orchestration is preferred; but not mandatory.

2. Tuesday | IBM Think 2021
   
   

   On May 11th, we will be partially integrating our CASTLE program with IBM Think 2021 (Americas).

   • Faculty and students using university email addresses can register for Think 2021 by creating an IBM ID and signing up here. An IBM ID can be created by anyone, even if they don't work with IBM.
   • Faculty, students and IBM employees using W3 ID with VPN access can access Think 2021 on YourLearning here. The W3 ID access is applicable only if you have an IBM email and VPN access.
   • Faculty and students who do not have VPN access, even you have W3 Id, should register for Think 2021 using your university email addresses, do NOT register with your w3 Id


3. Wednesday | Cloud Pak for Data - Auto AI has Gone Through A Major Refresh
   
   

   AutoAI is a graphical tool in Watson Studio that automatically analyzes your data and generates candidate model pipelines customized for your predictive modeling problem. These model pipelines are created iteratively as AutoAI analyzes your dataset(s) and discovers data transformations, algorithms, and parameter settings that work best for your problem setting. New (in beta) for AutoAI, when you specify the data for an AutoAI experiment, you can choose to combine two or more data sources that share a common column, or key. Join Dennis Buttera, Technology Advocate, Advanced Studies in this tutorial where you will learn how to join several data sources, and then build an experiment that uses the data to train a machine learning experiment. We will then deploy the resulting model and use it to run predictions.

4. Thursday | IBM Cognos Analytics in Practice
   
   

   Join the Cognos team as they take you through the journey of the Business Intelligence tool Cognos Analytics. The event will start with live demonstration of Data Exploration by Heena Chhatlani, followed by Reporting demo by Rachel Su and then Data Science in Cognos overview by Kasun Attanapola. This product team brings in decades of experience with the tool and intends to highlight the new features of the upcoming version and the usage of Cognos in day-to-day businesses.

   No previous experience with the tool is required.