Tag Archives: COVID-19

We have temporarily added a new section so readers can more easily find IT news related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also maintaining a list of unit-level updates re: IT operations and resources. Have a story or kudo about how IT staff has helped transition the university to working remotely? Contact us or use our submission form to tell us about it.

Vax Viewer to track COVID-19 vaccination compliance records

By | July 26, 2022

The University of Michigan has launched Vax Viewer, a user-friendly tool that allows campus community members to submit and view the status of their COVID-19 vaccination information all in one place. Vax Viewer shows community members the information they have submitted, the status of those submissions, and links for uploading vaccination information, as well as how to request… Read More »

Dearborn door screening improved

UM-Dearborn deployed a door screening system for Fall 2020 where live screeners checked student and faculty ResponsiBLUE screens, took their temperatures, and compared their Mcard swipes against schedules to ensure they had a class in the building on that particular day. This process was highly successful in keeping building densities low while ensuring compliance with public health guidelines.… Read More »

Collaborative learning projects connect staff, build skills during remote work

In February of 2020, just before Campus shifted to remote work, an interdisciplinary group formed to learn about creating web mapping applications using the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. The idea: work on a project that meets the needs of a researcher, but also provides an opportunity to share and grow knowledge across teams, in turn allowing us to… Read More »

U-M rolls out updated ResponsiBLUE app

By | January 20, 2021

The ResponsiBLUE application has been updated and expanded for the winter 2021 semester. U-M first launched ResponsiBLUE during the fall 2020 semester to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, aid in circulating public health knowledge, and ensure student safety. University Information and Technology Services developed ResponsiBLUE in partnership with the university leadership and the Office of Research. The app, which… Read More »

Lessons in architecture: 3-D without leaving the classroom (or living room)

By | December 22, 2020

When architecture professor Jonathan Rule wanted his students to see firsthand the way various building materials came together, he had to find a construction site near campus and arrange for the class to walk through. Finding a suitable project isn’t always feasible, not to mention the logistics and liability involved. So with assistance over the past year from… Read More »

XR Initiative at 1: Milestones met as pandemic brings new challenges, opportunities

By | December 22, 2020

When leaders at the Center for Academic Innovation announced an XR initiative a little more than a year ago, they knew there was a hunger from a growing segment of campus to advance teaching through the development of augmented and virtual reality technologies. They couldn’t have anticipated, however, that a global pandemic would so disrupt education that faculty… Read More »

Watch: Lessons learned from quick pivots to online education

By | December 21, 2020

The winter term that begins in January will be the third term in a row that instructor David Chesney’s unique software design course will be online, and he has learned from each iteration.  For the past decade, the U-M electrical engineering and computer science lecturer has taught Software for Accessibility, a class he designed in which  undergraduate students… Read More »

HoloLens2 for Nursing: ‘Hands-on’ learning during pandemic and beyond

By | December 21, 2020

The U-M School of Nursing has one of the most technologically advanced programs around with its Clinical Learning Center, yet leadership in the school wrestled with how to teach hundreds of students the hands-on nursing skills and procedures required to advance in the program, while following COVID-19 guidelines for social distancing and university calls to minimize in-person courses.… Read More »

ResponsiBLUE Guest required for all university visitors

By | December 15, 2020

Information and Technology Services (ITS) has been overseeing the technical aspects of U-M’s recent effort to implement the guest version of ResponsiBLUE, the health-screening tool developed to help keep the university healthy and reduce the spread of COVID-19. The State of Michigan now requires all visitors, contractors and vendors through April 14, 2021, to complete a preliminary health… Read More »

HPC allocation for academic use

To support academic discovery, ARC-TS will offer Great Lakes High-Performance Computing Cluster for classroom use for the 2020-2021 academic year. Each course can have $100 per student for HPC, GPU, Jupyter, and RStudio resources. Great Lakes is the university’s flagship, open-science, high-performance computing cluster. Just one second of computing on the Great Lakes network is the same as… Read More »

Conversational assistants could be used to improve African American health around COVID-19

By | December 1, 2020

U-M researchers say employing a conversational assistant could be one way to narrow the gap in health disparities impacting the African American community, particularly around the current COVID-19 pandemic. Lionel Robert, associate professor at the School of Information and senior author of a study in the journal Digital Government: Research & Practice, says a technological solution could keep… Read More »

COVID-19 research leverages machine learning and high-performance computing

A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site.  The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, associate professor of… Read More »

Patient data tells a story to help Michigan Medicine clinicians read ahead

Hospital patients produce a tremendous amount of data. Throughout Michigan Medicine, MCIRCC’s PICTURE analytic is reading the stories within this data to help clinicians act on potential emergencies chapters in advance. In the summer of 2020, the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC) detailed its predictive analytic “PICTURE,” which crunches an array of patient data—including… Read More »