2018 Michigan IT Symposium Posters

View a PDF of the poster: DEI Tips on Improving Customer Service

University departments that are charged with providing customer service have exciting opportunities to ensure that we incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into every interaction and project. The DEI Committees within Information Technology Services (ITS), Health Information Technology & Services (HITS), and the Libraries have all been developing programs to include awareness of and respect for diversity among the individuals we serve.

HITS has encouraged the use of designated personal pronouns on email signatures, in MCommunity and Wolverine Access, and when working with customers to show respect for gender identity.

ITS has worked on improving the identification and resolution of technology accessibility issues for people with disabilities, people for whom English is an additional language, etc.

The UM Library's DEIA Day of Development created a cross-campus collaborative environment to share DEIA strategies in areas such as services to nontraditional and international students and professional development in intercultural awareness.

This poster session will review the details and effects of each committee's work and will provide suggestions on how these improvements can be implemented more widely.

View a PDF of the poster: Intercultural Communication: Low and High Context Cultures

Introducing Low-Context (LC) and High-Context (HC) cultures to the University of Michigan diverse community where the LC and HC terms are referred to the value cultures place on direct and indirect communication. The goal is to assist the understanding of intercultural communication and strengthen interpersonal relationships.

View a PDF of the poster: Auditing IT - A Defense in Depth Approach

Information technology (IT) can be found all over the University of Michigan. The IT group of University Audits is tasked with auditing information technology security at the University of Michigan. To help direct this effort we have taken a defense in depth approach. The approach is based on the military principle that it is more difficult for an enemy to defeat a complex and multi-layered defense system than to penetrate a single barrier.

By utilizing a defense in depth approach, IT audits focuses on IT systems that may pose the greatest potential risk to the University of Michigan in an effort to minimizes the probability that the efforts of malicious hackers will succeed.

View a PDF of the poster: Utilizing Visual Management to Manage Daily Work

The MiChart Ambulatory team utilizes electronic visual management in the forms of task boards, project boards, issue boards and metric boards. Each board displays activity streams divided by various segments of the application lifecycle. For example, our project visual board that is reviewed collectively during weekly team meetings, displays views for analysis, governance, build, test, production and denials. Another example is our ambulatory metric board. This tool provides performance analytics which enables the team to measure and track metrics overtime, providing opportunities to become proactive in managing daily work. The use of visual management has also trickled into the redesign of our daily huddle. Each day a different topic is displayed on an electronic board addressing various topics: Oldest tickets, Change Control Updates, Items going into MiChart next week, Unassigned tickets and topics for Fridays Lunch & Learn. Introducing these tools has significantly improved challenges relating to response time, transparency, organization and providing the team with information needed to eliminate waste and other problems such as poor quality.

View a PDF of the poster: Training Certification for Security Incident Reporting

In fall of 2016 the Office of University Development (OUD) set up a Qualtrics survey to help gather feedback from staff asserting they had reviewed University security incident reporting policies, including how to identify and respond to phishing emails. The survey was quick and easy and gave us hard numbers we could share with ITS showing our unit was in compliance. We were happy to have developed a simple and effective way to familiarize members of OUD with these important procedures. Having counted this as a success, we were surprised to discover in the spring of 2017 that several of our staff had fallen victim to phishing schemes. That is, until we realized that every single one of them was a new hire and had not taken the certification survey the previous fall. So we expanded the certification process to address this gap in our onboarding training.

Now, in addition to annual recertification in the fall for all staff, we make sure any new hires receive the same training within 2 weeks of their start date. Since implementing the course, security incidents have fallen from seven in 2016, to one in 2017, and none so far this year. We attribute this improvement to our staff, who now have a much better understanding of how to spot and respond to phishing attacks.

View a PDF of the poster: Knowledge, Empowerment, and Support: The Keys to Healthy Performance Improvement

Interested in pay-for-performance or similar systems that incentivize work to produce higher quality? Don't be. Decades of academic research conducted by scholars like Edward Deci and Frederick Herzberg have proven how detrimental those systems can be, in the long run, to a person's performance and motivation. What should you do instead? The first step is accepting that others cannot motivate you, just as you cannot motivate anyone else. The only person who can authentically motivate you is you. Based on this principle, HITS Performance & Improvement Management (PIM) has spent the last few years honing and testing its own methodology for infusing teams with a culture of continuous performance improvement. This poster describes each step of the process, explains the underlying principles and relevant academic research, and showcases real-world results.

View a PDF of the poster: The Making of a Museum Online Exhibition: Theory and Practice

The University of Michigan is home to several extraordinary museums, including the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology a hidden gem that houses a collection of more than 100,000 ancient artifacts and mounts a few special exhibitions annually. These exhibitions showcase various topics in the archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean and its contemporary connections. Each special exhibition is accompanied by a website serving to promote the physical show, extend its lifespan, and provide a valuable resource for research, teaching, and learning. In this presentation, I will share my experience of building more than ten online exhibitions for the Kelsey Museum. I will discuss both theoretical questions (the purpose of online exhibitions, their target audience, and relationship to other types of websites) and more practical aspects (the choice of a platform, information architecture, interaction design, and creative use of existing text, graphic, and multimedia assets). The making of an online exhibition is a collaborative process that involves curators, designers, collection managers, editors, and other museum staff members; I will present the best practices we have developed at the Kelsey to ensure a smooth and efficient workflow throughout the online exhibition timeline.

View a PDF of the poster: Policies Unpublicized: Protecting Content in LSA Gateway and Unit Portals in AEM

The LSA Gateway provides an "intranet" type resource to help simplify access to internal materials and assets all in one location. Creating the Gateway changed the way administrative policies and protocols are accessed across the college while simultaneously protecting content from public access.

Portals are unit-intranets where administrators are empowered to manage their permissions and internal content for their unit audiences.

View a PDF of the poster: Behavior Driven Development with Jenkins and Cucumber Automation Framework

As software developers, we are constantly collaborating with our customers to develop new solutions. Often, the business analysts find it hard to understand the technical specifications of the IT experts. Cucumber is an ideal automation tool that merges the business logic and the test documentation in a smooth and transparent manner. Customer requested features are written in plain text following the Gherkin syntax. The tool suggests the blueprint steps for the developers to write the feature tests. Tests are run before, during, and after the development of the feature. Cucumber thus acts as a conduit between the test-driven development cycle and the behavior development cycle. Cucumber-selenium and cucumber-java were used for testing the web application. Jenkins with Cucumber-Jenkins plugin was used for continuous integration. Cucumber-Jenkins plugin displays the list of features, steps, along with the duration and status statistics for each feature.

One main advantage of the Cucumber-Jenkins plugin is that the business collaborators can see the status of each feature as it is being developed, suggesting a change of logic or modifying a feature is made easier using the Cucumber framework. Communication between the customer, business expert and the developers is seamless in this environment. Cucumber's flexible syntax encourages reuse of steps thus maximizing the test code reusability.

We will share our experience using Cucumber to test the new web portal of our Advancement community.

View a PDF of the poster: School of Social Work Timekeeping System

To improve accountability and support for U-M School of Social Work employees, an independent timekeeping system was developed. Based on a system that predates the one used by U-M HR, the new system provides an improved user experience, mobile friendliness, and improved accessibility.

View a PDF of the poster: Low Cost Lecture Capture

Saving about 60% a year on the cost of lecture capture is just one reason why the College of Pharmacy made the switch to MiVideo Classroom. MiVideo is U-M's streaming media service powered by Kaltura. Classroom brings great new features to Pharmacy like scheduled recordings, direct to Canvas publishing, free unlimited storage and streaming, and closed captioning services.

View a PDF of the poster: Workload Automation in the Cloud

ITS EAS Migrations and Scheduling Team (MST) are completing a critical project of moving ITS batch job scheduling processes from an antiquated application to the latest in cloud-based workload automation technology - Redwood's RunMyJobs (RMJ). MST monitor and support over 150,000 scheduled IT jobs monthly. These jobs process everything from financial operations, student grades, UM hospital supply replenishment, payroll, benefits, and many more. RMJ cloud-based functionality provides end-to-end workload automation, ease of scheduling and managing critical business processes, alignment of ITS business procedures across different areas thus eliminating islands of automation, and provides better insight for users with a tool that allows visibility to manage and change work flow rapidly.

View a PDF of the poster: CAENbuntu: Secure and Stable Ubuntu Delivered by Ansible

Our project aims to deliver a solid and secure base ubuntu image that can then be customized further for use within various departments of the college of engineering. This project is unique in that we have to account for all of the various use cases such as servers and desktops as well as the various compliance issues that arise when working on sensitive research. Ansible is a tool that allows us to do just that.

View a PDF of the poster: Michigan Medicine Identity and Access Management Standards

The Identity and Access Management poster addresses Michigan Medicine Authentication Standards and User Account Lifecycle.

Authentication protocols fall into four categories: Strategic, Emerging, Tactical, and Non-Standard. Prior to this year, authentication protocols were not standardized, which confused customers, impacted HITS Service Desk, and resulted in poor identity and access security. In 2018, the Technical Standards Committee approved the Michigan Medicine Authentication standard, providing clear and secure methods to authenticate into Michigan Medicine network.

User Account Lifecycle security involves applying best practices during Onboarding, Maintaining, and Offboarding accounts that report directly or indirectly to the Executive Vice President of Medical Affairs.

Employee on-boarding begins with new hire acceptance with Human Resources. Automated processes provide communications with employee, communications with hiring manager, integration with credentialing agencies (for providers). Non-employees are on-boarded through a combination of manual and automated processes with IAM tools and have a 12-month sponsorship.

Account maintenance involves adding value to identities by sharing and collecting authoritative data with Michigan Medicine customers. Automated messages are generated for periodic maintenance events (password reset and non-employee 12-month sponsorship expiration) and our automated tools create and maintain entitlements and roles which provide digital and physical access controls for employees and non-employees.

Account off-boarding provides security by deactivating accounts within one hour of employment termination. Deactivation occurs on the end date. Accounts are removed from client-facing systems 30 days after deactivation.

With authentication standards and account lifecycle, IAM provides digital security and efficient solutions for a range of customers at Michigan Medicine.

View a PDF of the poster: Data that Plays Well with Others: Extending Canvas with APIs

Did you ever wish Canvas did just one more thing? Or that you could take the data from two views or data warehouses - and show them on the same page? This session will introduce attendees to a middle path between using off-the-shelf software and building in-house software from scratch: customizing and combining data from multiple sources to extend software functionality. Key topics include APIs and LTIs, two programming standards that allow different software to share data. Examples bridging Canvas, Qualtrics, electronic health record will be shared.

View a PDF of the poster: Michigan Medicine Device Support for Service Providers

The tool utilizes Splunk to access multiple indexes or databases and presents the collected information on a single page in a single application. The information is used for diagnostics, troubleshooting and problem resolution

View a PDF of the poster: Sensitive Data Discovery: (Free) Scanning at Scale

The Sensitive Data Discovery (SDD) tool is a in-house developed solution that is composed of two parts:

1. The scanning engine, Seeker, which checks for patterns like Social Security numbers (SSNs) and credit card numbers on Windows machines, file shares, web servers, and database servers. Additionally, staff can request that it scan for additional patterns that may be helpful to their unit. For example, if researchers in a unit want to check for numbers that could potentially be medical record numbers or some other type of number, they can request that. A biannual scan is done for all MiWorkspace devices, as well as for a number of units that have opted in to the service.
2. The web portal, that allows Information Assurance (IA) staff and Security Unit Liaisons (SUL) to view and respond to the findings of the scan for their respective units. Additionally, users with with findings can be notified directly through the SDD web portal to respond to the files that were flagged as potentially having sensitive data. This interface replaces the previously used Excel reports, where users were asked to respond through email or via Google sheets.

This SDD process is a constantly evolving process, one that requires evaluating the performance and accuracy after each cycle.

View a PDF of the poster: Data Concierge at Michigan Medicine

The Michigan Medicine Data Concierge is a service that provides way-finding for data and data-related products (such as dashboards, reports and extracts). The Data Concierge service will coordinate with tangential services, aligning resources to resolve user requests. The Data Concierge provides navigation of the Health System and University environments, with a goal of including both internal and external service providers. The mission of the Data Concierge is to improve the user experience for securing data products and data-related services for Michigan Medicine constituents. A foundational aspect of the service will be its focus on improvement, meaning that the Data Concierge will: Determine the solution (options, recommendations, trade-offs) that considers aspects of speed and quality; Assist with problem definition (i.e. what problem is the user trying to solve?); Manage user expectations; Specify service levels where clarity around services does not exist; Establish cooperative partnerships with data product and data-related service providers; Increase the knowledge base for leveraging data products and data-related services

View a PDF of the poster: DUO: Protecting You and the U Two-Factor @ Weblogin Expansion

Two-factor authentication has been used at U-M for over 10 years, initially for access to servers and administrative systems. Two factor authentication is particularly effective in reducing the risk related to compromised accounts, as well as the threat from phishing attacks, which is the leading attack vector for external attackers. To further protect U-M institutional data as well as sensitive personal information, we are expanding the use of Duo to include protection of all applications behind Weblogin. The flexibility of the Duo solution allows for multiple device options to satisfy two-factor authentication with minimal disruption.

View a PDF of the poster: U-M Careers Fluid Candidate Gateway

ITS, in coordination with University Staff HR, has implemented the Oracle fluid solution used by job applicants when applying for job postings. The web pages have been made more mobile-friendly and responsive, along with a new look and feel. The new streamlined process allows applicants to complete the application in a shorter period of time and provides a seamless experience across a variety of devices. Unlike many mobile apps, there is nothing for the candidate to download. Applicants can search for jobs from a mobile phone, mark a job as a Favorite, and return later—on a different device—to complete the application, using the same URL.

View a PDF of the poster: Digital Signage for Team Communication

Digital signage can be used for effective internal employee and team communication to improve operational effectiveness. Our own department balances day to day operational incidents and requests with projects and initiatives, which requires constantly shifting focus and multitasking. With the aid of digital signage, a range of operational status indicators can be presented as a dashboard with real-time live data to call attention to what staff should be aware of at the moment, such as new contacts awaiting acknowledgment, performance levels, idle work in need of action, high priority tasks, etc. In addition, this form of visual communication can be used effectively for calling attention to team successes, motivation towards goals, positive department news and transparency of performance trends over time.

View a PDF of the poster: MiData: Student Data Privacy Tool

MiData is a student privacy tool for the U-M community. This tool will allow students to view and understand the various data that is collected of them by the university, as well as, provide them control over what is being collected, and help them understand how the university is protecting their data.

View a PDF of the poster: Efficient Data Warehouse Processing Using Informatica

Our original Data Warehouse (DW) Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes involve complex programming, multiple servers and numerous points of potential failures. We are currently migrating our processes to Informatica, an ETLtool to streamline and speed up processing.

The original process involves writing an SQR program that transforms writes data to files in the layout of the data warehouse table. In most cases, a program is needed for each table. After all of the programs that write data are complete, another process FTPs the data to the data warehouse server. Once all of the files have been FTPed, another process reads them and inserts the data into each data warehouse table.

By using Informatica to perform the ETL, we have reduced run times as this tool directly connects to both source and destination data sources and loads data warehouse tables in a single step. We have also eliminated the arduous process of separately extracting the data, moving it to a new destination and then loading it into the data warehouse. We have also eliminated the need to write or change complex programs and in most cases, programs needed to load the data into the data warehouse. This allows us to spend more time working on enhancements and projects versus maintaining existing processes.

View a PDF of the poster: Identity Governance Tool

The Identity Governance tool will gradually become available for U-M and Michigan Medicine to strategically and proactively manage access to university digital and physical resources ensuring the right individual accesses the right resource at the right time, from the right environment, and for the right reason. This poster will explain the benefits, tool features, and possible opportunities for U-M and Michigan Medicine.

View a PDF of the poster: Network Automation Banishes Tedium and Configuration Errors

ITS Networking group has been building a network configuration management and automation system in order to support an anticipated increase in network utilization by big data analytics and growing cloud computing operations, as well as to promote U-M's efforts to keep the pace with technological advancements.

The team adopted a vendor-agnostic automation framework and a set of open source principals that will allow operations staff to:

1. reduce menial work by abstracting common or repetitive configuration tasks
2. raise the level of consistency within our configurations by removing and preventing configuration drift.

Automation offers the greatest benefits as well as the largest challenges in the effort to modernize network operations. We envision a new "swiss army knife" for Network Engineering and Operations, where from a single point of view staff can make changes to as well as gather operational state from arbitrary collections of network devices. A phased roll-out of this system can serve as a model for other tools as we move forward with the modernization effort into other areas of our operations.

View a PDF of the poster: Scaling Border Network Security at the University of Michigan

Information and Technology Services (ITS) provides and maintains the University of Michigan s network (UMnet). UMnet is the core unifying technology connecting all schools, college, and institutes to each other and the internet. Further, it is the critical core technology enabler for the multitude of technologies U-M s various missions depend on to operate. UMnet directly connects to the internet with multiple redundant 100 Gbps connections, offering U-M immense flexibility and opportunity to collaborate with anyone, anywhere. However, no cost effective solutions are available today to protect the network and so UMnet is still vulnerable to network security threats which could impact its availability to the U-M community. What can be done?

ITS is in the process of creating a proof of concept to examine a custom network border security system that scales with the university s network capacity needs. Based on a model pioneered by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and adopted by Indiana, Ohio State, and Purdue, this solution will include a mix of vendor components and open source software (Bro). This solution uses various methods to classify network traffic as either a threat or not and then modifies access control lists on an inline device to stop the threat. When large research flows are detected it passes the data through without further inspection, thus allowing the cluster to keep up with the flow of data. This system is referred to as an LBL Bro Cluster. U-M s implementation of the LBL Bro Cluster will be evaluated through mid-November 2018.

View a PDF of the poster: Transforming Network Monitoring: perfSONAR Embedded in Network Devices

Network devices are beginning to offer more on-board compute and storage resources, allowing for their use as a platform for distributed network monitoring via perfSONAR. This poster will give an overview of the University of Michigan's experience evaluating multiple vendors and platforms with embedded perfSONAR instances. We will be discussing overall performance, current platform limitations, and emerging trends, as well as the next steps.

To arrive at the next, transformational level of network monitoring and management, we have to embark on a large scale perfSONAR deployment. This introduces provisioning, maintenance, and fault detection challenges. Exploiting recent direction in network device design that offers more compute and storage functionality to embed monitoring software within the device would alleviate these concerns.

We developed a case study with the few of the devices with an embedded perfSONAR in the University of Michigan (U-M) and Iowa University networks to enable it to function as a piece of the hardware as well as a performance benchmark and monitoring tool. The study includes development, deployment, configuration and usage of embedded perfSONAR. The premise is that the embedded perfSONAR will have the same capabilities as stand alone perfSONAR node, without introducing additional hardware or facility cost. Our exploration of this concept led us to conclude that this emerging approach is viable, and we are at the beginning of the experimentation that promises benefits for overall networking operations.

View a PDF of the poster: Projectplace - Bringing Agile & Waterfall Project Management Together

The ITS Project Management Office (PMO) has received requests for an easy to use collaborative work tracking and project management tool. In January 2017 the PMO began piloting Projectplace to a small group of users. ProjectPlace uniquely melds the traditional gantt view of tracking project efforts with a kanban style board similar to Trello. This allows for the best of both waterfall and scrum work tracking. It also has a capability to track people's efforts towards their work in cards and on a timesheet.

As word spread and use expanded, groups began using it to manage projects as well as their operational teams. Staff report that it makes keeping track of day-to-day tasks easier, as well as gaining a view into the workload of their teams.

View a PDF of the poster: Virtual Data Center (vDC) in AWS for ITS

The ITS Virtual Data Center (vDC) is a set of core technologies, network architectures, and account structures that allow ITS staff to more easily use Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is not an out-of-the-box solution for running applications in AWS; instead, the vDC provides basic services commonly available on campus like authentication, backups, and networking to provide ITS staff familiar technologies as they deploy solutions in AWS.

View a PDF of the poster: MPressive: Getting Help with the Push of a Button

The MPressive project started at Hacks With Friends with the idea of using Internet of Things devices as a way for users to request IT support. The advantages of a system like this include low deployment cost, quick setup, and ease of use for the customer. We implemented this project using serverless AWS products including Lambda and DynamoDB triggered by Amazon IoT buttons. The service currently creates an appropriate ServiceLink ticket and then sends the incident information to an appropriate Slack, Stride, or HipChat channel. A pilot release is live in Fleming.

View a PDF of the poster: UM-Turk: Leveraging Live, Online Data Explorations in Psychology Lecture Sections

Psych 303 is a large research methods class, enrolling around 600 students annually. Faculty who teach this class have reported difficulty in keeping students engaged, and students generally give the class low ratings. To increase class engagement and demonstrate real-world methods of data collection, faculty in the Psychology Department asked LSA-TS Advocacy and Research Support programmers to develop an easy-to-use interface that would allow them to quickly create crowd-sourced surveys with Amazon's Mechanical Turk, monitor results from the global worker pool on these surveys in real time, and visualize the resulting response data, all during the course of a lecture session. ARS developed a Chrome extension interfacing with both M-Turk and Qualtrics to facilitate these in-class demonstrations, which could be expanded to courses in a variety of disciplines.

View a PDF of the poster: Faculty Economics and Planning: Faculty Compensation and Productivity Benchmarking

The Faculty Compensation and Productivity Benchmarking tool is a Tableau dashboard that allows Medical School department representatives to compare the compensation and productivity of their faculty to a variety of benchmarks provided by national surveying organizations. Departments can access high-level views of department performance to chosen benchmarks, or drill down to statistics grouped by survey specialty or the individual faculty member level.

View a PDF of the poster: Combating Flu with E-Visits

E-Visits are a care delivery mechanism that allows patients to submit a questionnaire for common conditions to receive treatment from a Michigan Medicine provider. E-Visits were piloted at Michigan Medicine in select clinics beginning in June 2017. In February 2018, the health system was inundated with sick patients during peak flu season. In response, E-Visits were made available for all Primary Care Adults and most importantly included a new Cough and Flu Like Symptom questionnaire. E-Visits are an example of technology helping combat public health concerns by keeping contagious patients out of the clinic to receive treatment, when appropriate. Additionally, patients are satisfied having their needs addressed without leave the comfort of their home. The success of E-Visits can be credited to a strong partnership of technology, operations and clinical support.

View a PDF of the poster: The Lifecycle of Population Management Decision Support

Population health clinical decision support is a tool for clinicians that assists in providing preventative health services and disease management. Best Practice Advisories and Health Maintenance, examples of decision support, can also help achieve population health, quality, and payer program goals. In our poster, we will examine an overview of the population health decision support lifecycle as it applies to a particular disease management objective. We will inform the reader about the request process, analysis, build considerations, pilot programs, and monitoring and evaluation of the BPA over a designated amount of time.

View a PDF of the poster: State Innovation Model: Towards a Learning Health System to Reduce Emergency Department Visits

High utilizers of the Emergency Department (ED) often have complex needs that require coordination of care between multiple organizations. In 2015, Michigan received a State Innovation Model grant from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to test delivery and payment system changes to improve care quality. Working with stakeholders from health systems and community organizations focused on coordinating care (termed "hublets"), we are using a Learning Health Systems approach to intervene in a cohort of high ED utilizers identified using population-level data and predictive modeling.

Patient data from IHA, St. Joseph Mercy Health System, and Michigan Medicine is transmitted to the Michigan Data Collaborative every two months. After de-duplication of individuals across the data sources, our team fits a random forest model to predict ED visits for >300,000 residents of Livingston and Washtenaw counties. Patients projected to have high ED utilization are randomized into early versus delayed enrollment in a community-wide care coordination intervention in one of twelve participating hublets. Coordination between the hublets is performed using the MiCare Connect platform. The predictive model is re-fit every two months, and enrollment of patients is ongoing.

Our project is supported by Yottabyte for team-based development of predictive models, Turbo Research Storage for high-capacity storage needs, and MiShare to share protected health information across organizations.

Challenges and future directions for the project are 1) integration with the health information exchanges to make the intervention more responsive and sustainable and 2) storing, updating, and scaling the models using the Knowledge Grid.

View a PDF of the poster: The Michigan Data Collaborative: Providing Comprehensive Healthcare Data Across the State of Michigan

The Michigan Data Collaborative (MDC) is a data collection, enrichment, and provisioning group at the University of Michigan. We collect and aggregate statewide clinical and claims data from multiple payers, apply measures, and provide analytic tools, dashboards, and reports. Our services enable physician organizations, practices, and practitioners to better monitor and improve performance.

By blending the skills of both our technical and analytical teams, we support data-driven healthcare transformation to approximately 40 physician organizations and 20,000 providers that help to manage over 1.7 million patients across the state of Michigan. This poster will describe the services, processes, and tools that we use to deliver comprehensive healthcare data, capturing robust patient histories through the synthesis of clinical, claims, and admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) information gathered from multiple payers and organizations.

View a PDF of the poster: PrivaScope - Resolve Data Privacy Challenges for Research

PrivaScope enables analysis of sensitive data through the use of novel data protection mechanisms. While institutional safeguards will still need to be in place, PrivaScope can reduce the barriers to studying sensitive data by protecting the privacy of the subjects in the data using differential privacy techniques. Unlike existing commercial providers who often correlate data sets with little regard for privacy preservation, this project seeks to be an exemplar for how research can be conducted in an ethical, privacy-preserving manner.

Faculty in learning analytics, mobility, and precision health are actively engaged in the project, demonstrating its applicability to those fields. The diversity of such lines of inquiry will ensure that the PrivaScope framework is developed to serve a broad range of research applications, resulting in a science-domain-independent software framework with widespread applicability to the challenge of correlating multiple sensitive data sets.

The framework will give researchers an interface to query data that allows them to gain valuable insights such as how to optimize productivity by changing mobility patterns, what is the impact of gathering spaces and extracurricular activities on student academic outcomes, how to individualize healthcare treatment, and many more. This approach will allow responsible data repositories to grant access to sensitive data for research and analysis in ways they are not currently possible.

View a PDF of the poster: Minimizing Cybersickness through Increased-Intensity Habituation

Habituation has been shown to decrease cybersickness in virtual environments (VEs). This method has not been explored in depth as a method for decreasing symptoms because users are often not open to continued use following an initial experience that induces cybersickness. Recent research indicates decreasing the field of view decreases motion sickness but also decreases presence. We believe that incorporating increased field of view settings into the habituation method can allow users to avoid or experience lessened cybersickness symptoms without decreasing their feelings of presence in the environment. We created a VE which has the capacity to manipulate both the field of view and the blurred edge area. We tested it on two team members over a multi-day period and measured its potential effectiveness through a presence questionnaire (PQ), virtual reality sickness questionnaire (VRSQ), and the time we were able to remain in the VE before experiencing cybersickness. We found we were able to remain in the VE for increasingly longer periods of time over subsequent trials and that the visual manipulations did not affect our presence. We used these results, along with our observations while in the VE, to propose a protocol for continued research on this idea.

View a PDF of the poster: Adversarial Text Generation for Google's Perspective API

With the preponderance of harassment and abuse, social media platforms and online discussion platforms seek to curb toxic comments. Google's Perspective aims to help platforms classify toxic comments. We have created a pipeline to modify toxic comments to evade Perspective. This pipeline uses existing adversarial machine learning attacks to find the optimal perturbation which will fool the model. Since these attacks typically target images, as opposed to discrete text data, we include a process to generate text candidates from perturbed features and select candidates to retain syntactic similarity. With a model using just 10,000 queries, changing three words in each comment fools Perspective 25% of the time, suggesting that building a surrogate model may not require many queries. We hope that toxic comment classifiers can improve their robustness via adversarial training on examples generated by our approach.

View a PDF of the poster: Data Analysis at Scale with Cavium Thunder X

This poster will present our work on the Cavium Thunder X data science cluster to date, and present a case study where U-M researchers have successfully used the cluster to perform data analyses that they weren't otherwise able to do.

View a PDF of the poster: Research A-Z

To better serve the U-M research community, which operates within a largely decentralized research administration and communications infrastructure, the U-M Animal Care & Use Program has partnered with the U-M Medical School (UMMS) Office of Research to develop a Drupal-based content management system (CMS) to manage and disseminate 500+ research guidance documents. Launched in June 2018, the website is used to publish, maintain, and track all animal care and use documents (e.g., forms, guidelines, policies, SOPs, and resources) and all research guidance documents (e.g., templates, guidance, SOPs, policies, and resources) produced by the UMMS Office of Research's 12 service units. Built with ease of use in mind, the website offers a visually appealing, user-friendly interface to allow for quick navigation of over 500 reference documents. Researchers can browse for content in a variety of ways: open text search; sort by document type, document topic, or document author; most viewed documents; or recently updated documents. Each document is broken down into collapsible accordion list(s) for quick reference, and includes a date/time stamp denoting last updated date, unit contacts for more information, and a list of tagged related documents. Researchers can log in to the website using their U-M credentials to access protected content, save custom searches, and bookmark frequently used documents. Transitioning to a dynamic CMS has also improved our administrative processes permalinks eliminate the need to manually update links in multiple locations, automated alerts prompt content owners to review outdated documents, and redundancies in document management have been substantially reduced.

View a PDF of the poster: OSiRIS: Open Storage Research Infrastructure

OSiRIS is a collaboration between U-M, WSU, MSU, and IU to create a distributed, multi-institutional storage infrastructure designed to provide transparent, high-performance access to the same storage infrastructure from well-connected locations on our campuses. We enable this via a combination of network discovery, monitoring and management tools and through the creative use of CEPH features. By providing a single data infrastructure that supports computational access on the data in place, we can meet many of the data-intensive and collaboration challenges faced by our research communities and enable these communities to easily undertake research collaborations beyond the border of their own universities.

View a PDF of the poster: Computer-Controlled Instruments: Management, Security, and Lifecycle

Computer-controlled instruments are the lifeblood of scientific research occurring at the Life Sciences Institute. Consistent and reliable operation of these systems is critical. However, managing and securing the control computers is a delicate balance that present many unique challenges for technology staff. Highlighted are some strategies LSI IT is using to help our researchers maximize their investments in instrumentation, especially when legacy technologies are involved.

View a PDF of the poster: Unleashing the Value of Learning Data: Building a Unified Data Platform

The Unizin Data Platform (UDP) is a cloud-based infrastructure for delivering learning analytics products and services to enable a data-driven teaching and learning ecosystem. The UDP collects data from across the teaching and learning landscape and represents it in a common structure, called the Unizin Common Data Model (UCDM). The data model enables student performance, demographic, and learning tool data to be queried, analyzed, and repurposed to facilitate the development of learning analytics dashboards, performance monitoring and alerts, new learning tools, and learning sciences investigation.

View a PDF of the poster: Capturing Conversations: A Database of Digital Learning Tools

This database is an effort to capture and disseminate the knowledge and experience of Instructional Technologists and Instructional Designers regarding the adoption and implementation of instructional technologies. Data captured includes technical data, such as the hardware required, licensing or subscriptions fees, and platform compatibility, as well as pedagogical data regarding support, instructor experiences, use case scenarios, and issues with rollout and scaling. This represents a collaboration with many IT units across campus, centered in the Teaching and Technology Collaborative and the Instructional Design SiG.

View a PDF of the poster: BA 200 and FCI: A novel approach to collaborative course design

Only about 1% of the University of Michigan's 9,200 courses enroll more than 200 students, but these courses are incredibly impactful. Business Administration 200: Businesses and Leaders: The Positive Difference (BA200) is one of these participating courses, and is the first course for freshmen who are entering the business school. BA200 is participating the FCI and includes a collaboration with the Ross Business School, LSA-TS and CRLT. The effort includes the use of new technology for visualizing course content (CourseTunes) and a unique cross-college approach to instructional design and implementation.

View a PDF of the poster: Generating Learning Data at Scale - Cloud-based learning analytics infrastructure

In support of the MIDAS Learning Analytics Research Hub, ITS Teaching & Learning (T&L) is providing cutting-edge technical expertise related to learning data interoperability standards, student success, data visualization, and cloud-based enterprise infrastructure for learning analytics. T&L leads the working group overseeing development of the IMS Global Caliper Analytics specification. Caliper’s growing adoption is powered in part by T&L’s technical leadership, advocacy, consulting, and community-building among institutional peers, campus partners, and commercial suppliers such as Instructure, Google, Kaltura, Explorance, MacMillan. Caliper adoption offers the tantalizing prospect of a more unified learning data environment in which to build innovative student success services designed to measure, infer, predict, report, and visualize. T&L is also working closely with the Unizin consortium to build enterprise-class learning analytics infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform. The resulting Unizin Data Platform (UDP) collects and manages learning analytics data that is used to drive personalized services for Michigan students and faculty. In addition to driving transactional learning analytics services, the UDP is also a point of aggregation for data from our 21 institutional partners, producing the world’s largest learning analytics research laboratory, the Unizin Learning Lab (ULL). Please stop by to learn more about this exciting work and the role T&L is playing in supporting the success of local Michigan students, while also having a global impact on the future of learning science and data-informed digital learning.

View a PDF of the poster: Contributing to a Culture of Improved Assessment and Evaluation through Enhanced Technology

Continuous quality improvement is a necessary process for any educational program. Technology assists us to carry out the process to measure our assessment of medical students and the evaluation of the faculty and the curriculum. New technology for both assessments and evaluations have been implemented in the past year at the medical school: ExamSoft and Blue. These tools allow for the opportunity of improved analysis of the curriculum and a streamlined, user friendly experience in both aspects.

View a PDF of the poster: IQ/SI Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning Collaboration

API Directory includes a suite of APIs from various data domains within the university. Our goal is to provide the data to everyone within the university with a well built data governance for each API. The presentation will include a hands on session on how to publish a sample API as an API Publisher and also how to consume it as an application developer. I believe this presentation will break the barriers of adopting new technology across the university IT units.

T&L partnered with researchers from the School of Information and School of Education to develop a learning analytics dashboard for students. To design the data visualizations, the team leveraged researchers expertise in learning, motivation, and information visualization. The dashboard provides a transparent view of students standing in the course, reveals behavioral patterns associated with good studenting skills, and guides decisions about possible actions students can take that may improve their academic outcomes.

The researchers are studying student use of the dashboard to uncover correlations between use of analytics and changes in student behavior leading to improvement in student outcomes. The project both supports the research goals and provides developers an opportunity to build a service that consumes data in the new Unizin Data Platform (UDP).

U-M partnered with the Unizin consortium to deliver a learning data platform that provides the storage, data sets, governance, and services to enable access to cross-domain information in a timely and repeatable way. This project helps shape the data services that Unizin is developing with the UDP. With the student dashboard in a pilot phase this fall, the team continues to iterate on the visualizations while monitoring student usage and surveying students for feedback. The research and analysis from the pilot phase will inform future dashboard development and usage on campus.

View a PDF of the poster: Your Better Foot Forward: CV/Portfolio Websites through LSA Web Services

More often than not, people form their first impressions of you based on your online presence. If your website looks like it was built in or hasn't been touched since the 90's, visitors will often conclude that your knowledge is also dated and rusty. Worse yet, you don't have a website at all.

Properly representing yourself with a professional website lends credibility, enhances visibility in your field, and is extremely important to your career growth.

CV/Portfolio Websites available through LSA Web Services provide LSA faculty, staff, and graduate students a platform to improve the quality of their online presence, exhibit expertise, impress peers, and make new connections.

View a PDF of the poster: Michigan IT Community: Get Connected!

More than 2,700 IT professionals work in U-M's schools and colleges, libraries, research institutes, health system, technology offices, and administrative units to further the university's missions through the innovative use of technology. The Office of the VPIT-CIO sponsors multiple programs to build community, foster skills & professional development, and enhance innovation across the Michigan IT Community. This poster shares events offered and how to get involved, including Michigan IT Symposium, Hacks with Friends, Communities of Practice, Mentoring Program, Leadership Program and Newsletter.