This election year in Michigan has seen a huge increase in absentee ballot requests. As a result, clerk’s offices are spending a lot of time answering phone calls from voters checking on the status of their ballot. School of Information graduate students Lauren Trimble, Joshua Tooker, and Michael Payne worked this summer on a pilot project to streamline… Read More »
While preparing for the fall term under the COVID-19 pandemic, the university recognized that the student experience on campus in the 2020–21 academic year would be very different than a regular term at U-M. To support students on campus, the university launched a new web-based space reservation system and app for the Ann Arbor campus called Study Spaces… Read More »
CISO Tuesdays is a Medium blog, crowdsourced from higher education, that provides a snapshot of a “typical” day for a chief information security officer. Recently, U-M’s own CISO, Sol Bermann, shared a post describing how the pandemic has less changed things in regard to information security and higher ed, but rather simply “made them more.” Entitled My days… Read More »
COVID-19 created many challenges for health care organizations like Michigan Medicine as faculty and staff had to balance providing world-class patient care with keeping their colleagues and themselves safe. This transition impacted every department, most notably Health Information Technology & Services (HITS). “Shifting to a remote work environment is not as simple as taking your computer to a… Read More »
After supporting the move of students, faculty, and staff to remote learning and working, Ross IT developed plans for a “public health-informed” return to campus for the fall semester. Ross IT engaged with the Ross community to prepare how to transform the classrooms to meet the hybrid academic requirements. The approach involved three principles for design: consistent, standardized,… Read More »
U-M’s COVID-19 data dashboard earned high marks in a recent evaluation by a team of Yale and Harvard researchers. “We Rate Covid Dashboards,” a new Twitter account and website that grades pandemic dashboards created by colleges and universities, awarded U-M an “A” grade for being easy to read, sharing community data trends, and identifying how many students are… Read More »
The kinesiology students in Scientific Inquiry Using Wearable Technology class represent one of four groups that came to campus to experience the lab-based course that uses the latest technology to study how movement and function impact health. The experiment the team designed uses a Bioharness3 worn as a chest strap, a Biostrap worn on the arm (new technology… Read More »
As summer wound down, campus got ready for the fall semester at UM-Dearborn. An Emergency Operations Center directive necessitated restricting campus access to only those students with an on campus class—around 15% of our schedule. To do this efficiently and minimize health risks by reducing time standing in line, we turned to technology. Our reporting tool, WebFocus, produces… Read More »
In this time when so many of us are working and studying remotely, we are increasingly reliant on our home internet service and the WiFi networks within our homes. ITS Network teams, Neighborhood IT, and campus IT partners developed a set of resources to help members of our community improve their home networking experience.
Google.org announced that a team of School of Information (UMSI) researchers has been selected to receive funding as part of the company’s efforts to support projects using innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to help understand COVID-19 and address its impacts. Faculty members Tiffany Veinot, Vinod Vydiswaran, Lorraine Buis, and Anna Laurie will receive $200,000 in funds to… Read More »
A 3D bioengineered model of lung tissue built by U-M researchers is poking holes in decades worth of flat, Petri dish observations into how the deadly disease pulmonary fibrosis progresses. Some clinicians are concerned that critically ill COVID-19 patients may develop a form of pulmonary fibrosis after a long stay in the ICU. Researchers are searching for better treatments.… Read More »
For ITS Infrastructure teams the Labor Day weekend was not a holiday — they were working down to the wire, fighting through bad weather in Ann Arbor to complete work on North Campus to complete a much needed network upgrade to Northwoods IV & V whose apartments are home to many U-M graduate students and their families. This… Read More »
Dependence on the U-M Network has always been strong, but this term it will be used in locations, and ways not seen before. With COVID-19 concerns at a high level, the university has come up with creative ideas to assist our faculty and students, and decrease density in buildings, by creating new outdoor spaces for students to work… Read More »
Since late June, when the university announced its decision to have students on campus and enable a combination of in-person, hybrid, and remote classes, LSA Technology Services quickly took action to enable an unprecedented delivery of the LSA liberal arts mission. In two short months, we’ve invested, improved, and implemented technology and services to not only meet the… Read More »
The University of Michigan recently launched the accessible, mobile-friendly website ResponsiBLUE (responsiblue.umich.edu) to help keep university community members healthy and reduce the spread of COVID-19. A downloadable mobile app for both Android and Apple platforms is in development and will be available soon. All faculty, staff and students entering U-M buildings are required to use ResponsiBLUE to meet… Read More »
For developing technology that’s helping to democratize the justice system while decreasing the spread of COVID-19, U-M law professor J.J. Prescott has earned this year’s Distinguished University Innovator Award. Prescott launched the U-M Online Court Project years ago to design and build technology to help people resolve minor disputes with the government and courts online and without the… Read More »
U-M senior Sabrina Corsetti‘s efforts to model the pandemic’s spread using a machine learning algorithm has now been included in those being aggregated for the CDC’s weekly projections. Corsetti had her previous research halted when U-M suspended in-person classes and labs back in March. Thomas Schwarz, one of Corsetti’s research professors, happened to be modeling the pandemic’s data… Read More »
Michigan Medicine is constantly looking for ways to improve the patient experience, even during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. One way the organization is doing just that is by optimizing eCheck-in and introducing mobile arrival, touchless processes that allow patients to skip the line when they arrive for an appointment. The changes launched on August 26. Prior to an… Read More »
Prior to the pandemic, enrollment for spring and summer field classes at the U-M Biological Station were at an all time high. Students eagerly planned to live away from home, at the BioStation near Douglas Lake in Pellston, Michigan. When the university announced that spring and summer courses would be virtual, faculty and staff at the BioStation had… Read More »
Paramveer Dhillon, U-M assistant professor of information, along with collaborators from MIT and five other universities, collected data from mobile phones, social media and the census to determine how the contact behaviors of people in a given region impact people in another state or region when reopening is not coordinated.