February 14, 2022

Try to imagine a world without computers everywhere: without smartphones, smart cars, connected appliances, streaming media and e-banking. For better or worse, the genie is out of the bottle — and computing, connectivity and artificial intelligence have become critically ingrained in nearly every aspect of modern life. This is not the world of the personal computer; this is the world that needs the College of Computing.

As we detailed in Part I and Part II, computing at Michigan Tech long predates the formation of the College. However, its formation represents an important inflection point. Manufacturing, criminal justice, marketing, health care — none of which are traditionally computing disciplines — are all being reinvented by digital technologies.

“Computing is no longer the purview of techies and programmers alone. Rather, digital transformation has morphed every discipline into a computing discipline,” says Dean Dennis Livesay. “The College of Computing was formed to make sure that all of these disciplines, especially those in Michigan and the surrounding region, have the computing talent they need to thrive in this brave new world.”

Part III continues on the College of Computing website. Read more about the College's vision and path forward.

The Board of Trustees will meet Feb. 25 from 9-11 a.m. in the Memorial Union Ballroom B, and public attendance is welcome.

Members of the public are invited to make public comments to the board in accordance with the Board of Trustees Bylaw 1.14. Those who wish to address items in the agenda, and who have filed their intent with the secretary of the board as required by Bylaw 1.14, will be limited to five minutes. Those addressing general topics are limited to three minutes.

If you wish to provide public comments to the Board of Trustees, please submit your intent to Sarah Schulte, secretary to the Board of Trustees, at shschult@mtu.edu. The deadline to submit your intent is Friday (Feb. 18).

The University Senate will convene Meeting 670 at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday (Feb. 16) in Dow 642. 

Those within the University community unable to attend in person have the option to attend via Zoom. Please note: You will need to log in to your MTU Zoom account to join the virtual meeting.

Senators are responsible for making their constituents aware of the agenda for this meeting. Senators who are unable to attend should arrange for their alternates to attend in their place. 

View the agenda to Meeting 670.

The need is constant. The gratification is instant. Give blood.

Currently, there is a critical need for blood donors. Please join us in the Rozsa Lobby and donate blood at the following times:

• Tuesday, Feb. 22 — 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Wednesday, Feb. 23 — 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Our location allows for social distancing while donating. We ask that everyone wear a face covering and reserve your appointment slot online ahead of time if possible. Please bring a photo ID with you. Donors will receive a free shirt and $10 Amazon gift card while supplies last.

For more information, visit the American Red Cross website or email Rochelle Spencer at raspence@mtu.edu.

You are invited to participate in the MTU Civic Innovation Community Resilience Survey.

The University of Washington and Michigan Technological University, together with civic partners at the Western Upper Peninsula Planning and Development Region (WUPPDR), are collaborating to develop innovative methods that use remote sensing data resources and community member engagement (crowdsourcing) to address current data gaps for improved flood hazard modeling and enhancing community resilience in rural communities of the western U.P. Through this survey, we are seeking information on your perspective on community resilience and associated indicators.

The survey takes about eight minutes to complete and is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) project titled "Helping rural counties to enhance flooding and coastal disaster resilience and adaptation," focused on Baraga and Houghton counties in Michigan.

“What is it like to be a woman in the United States?”

This year, Michigan Tech Theatre’s one-act festival, "An Evening of One Acts," features the world-premiere performances of college playwrights who can confidently declare, “I understood the assignment.”

Directed and performed by Michigan Tech students, every play is a world premiere written by a University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, and Dance (U-M SMTD) student. Seating is limited for each performance, so get your tickets in advance!

Stay tuned all week as we introduce you to each of the plays and how Michigan Tech’s visiting performance professor Kristy Dodson and U-M playwriting professor José Casas chose them for the festival.

• "An Evening of One Acts" — Multiple showtimes.
  Presented by Michigan Tech Theatre and U-M SMTD.
  • Show A — Thursday, Feb. 17 | Saturday, Feb. 19 | Friday, Feb. 25
    7:30 p.m. in McArdle Theatre.
  • Show B — Friday, Feb. 18 | Thursday, Feb. 24 | Saturday, Feb. 26 
    7:30 p.m. in McArdle Theatre.
  • Tickets: $15 for adults and $5 for youth. Michigan Tech students can attend for free and bring a friend with the Experience Tech Fee.
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• "Centurious" — Friday, Feb. 18, 7:30 p.m.
  Presented by Michigan Tech Music. Go on a time-traveling treasure hunt. This Friday, head back in time to uncover rare musical treasures with Mike Christianson and The Superior Wind Symphony. 
  
  • Tickets: $15 for adults and $5 for youth. Michigan Tech students can attend for free and bring a friend with the Experience Tech Fee.

Tickets for these events are available online, by phone at 906-487-2073, or in person at the Central Ticketing Office in the Student Development Complex. The Rozsa Box Office will also be open for ticket purchases an hour before performances.

Note: Face coverings are required for volunteers, staff, and audience members at these events. Please visit the Rozsa COVID-19 Policies for the most up-to-date information.

The Society of Wood Science and Technology (SWST) has created the traveling exhibition "Women Ambassadors Creating the Future of Wood Science," designed to celebrate women ambassadors over time — and Michigan Tech alumna Barb Wade ’78 (wood science) has been selected to be a member of this elite group.

The official announcement naming the 16 women chosen from around the world was made Friday (Feb. 11) to coincide with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The first stop for the exhibit is the 2022 SWST International Convention in Kingscliff, Australia, in July!

Posters about Wade and all of the other ambassadors are featured on the exhibition website.

Xiaoyong "Brian" Yuan, assistant professor in both the Computer Science and Applied Computing departments, will present a Computer Science department lecture at 3 p.m. on Friday (Feb. 18) in Rekhi 214.

The lecture can also be attended virtually via Zoom.

Yuan’s research interests span the fields of deep learning, machine learning, security and privacy, and cloud computing.

Read the abstract on the Computing News Blog.

At the VPOL, our aim is to help make you efficient and effective searchers, so we are dedicating the week to sharing tools and methods that will elevate how you find information. Throughout this week, expect to see featured tips and tricks from the library and chances to give them a try yourself.

Register to join our Bad Info: Search Like a Fact Checker workshop from 2-3 p.m. Thursday (Feb. 17) in Library 244 to up your searching game.

Show off your ability to tell quality information sources from bunk by entering our Searching Sideways Contest for the chance to win one of three $15 coffee cards. For the contest, simply share a link to an online source that at first glance appears less than trustworthy, but actually contains quality information.

Stop by our “Ask Us” station all week (or any other week, too) for help honing your search skills, set up a consultation for more in-depth help or arrange a searching workshop on demand for your class or study group.

Now let’s start searching sideways!

The Institute for Policy, Ethics, and Culture (IPEC) is partnering with the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, Office of the Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Portage Lake District Library and Michigan Humanities Council to present “Lives in Transition,” a virtual speaker series beginning Feb. 22 and ending March 17.

The Zoom webinar series features leading voices on transformative change and focuses on the technocultural changes that are collectively transforming lives. Each speaker brings expertise from their respective field to help us rethink ways of understanding the challenges we face, and navigate our way forward.

The series commences next Tuesday (Feb. 22) and concludes March 17. Speakers are listed below. Each event is scheduled from 7-8:15 p.m.

• Tuesday, Feb. 22 — Suzanne Simard, professor of forest ecology: "Finding the Mother Tree."
• Thursday, Feb. 24 — Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, cosmologist: "Black Feminist Technoscience in the Cosmos."
• Monday, Feb. 28 — Mic Isham, tribal chairman, Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Indians: "Stewardship of the Land in a Changing Climate."
• Wednesday, March 2 — Jer Thorp, data artist: "Living in Data."
• Tuesday, March 15 — Sara Hendren, adaptive and assistive technology: "Prosthetic Futures: Adaptive Technology for the Worlds We Want."
• Thursday, March 17 — Michael Lechuga, Latin American migration studies: "Aliens, Technology, and Citizenship in a Settler Colony." 

For more information and to register for the free Zoom webinars, please visit the IPEC website. Contact Erin Syth, IPEC manager, at elsyth@mtu.edu with any questions.

Three Physics graduate students will be presenting their research progress at this week's Physics Colloquium:

• Amin Hashemi (advised by Ramy El-Ganainy)
• Dezhi Huang (advised by Petra Huentemeyer)
• Shreya Joshi (advised by Claudio Mazzoleni)

This will be a hybrid event — the students will give their talks at 4 p.m. Thursday (Feb. 17) in Fisher 139. Please join in person or by Zoom.

Please register in advance to attend virtually. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event.

Event details, along with the students' presentation titles and abstracts, can be found on the University Events Calendar.

Michigan Tech women's basketball overcame a slow start to down Davenport 71-51 at DU Student Center on Thursday (Feb. 10) in Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference play.

Ellie Mackay led the way with 25 points and Sara Dax also made it to double figures with 11 points, nine rebounds. The Huskies shot a perfect 8-for-8 from the free-throw line and improved to 13-8 overall (8-5 GLIAC). 

"I was happy with how we played after the first quarter," said head coach Sam Clayton. "Ellie played a strong game and a lot of others contributed tonight as well."

Read more at the Michigan Tech Athletics website.

Michigan Tech men's basketball notched their sixth straight win Thursday (Feb. 10) over Davenport 84-72 at DU Student Center. 

Adam Hobson hit eight 3-pointers for a career-high 28 points. Trent Bell and Owen White also contributed double-doubles as Tech improved to 16-5 overall (12-3 GLIAC). 

"I wasn't that happy with our start but we adjusted well at halftime and really played well in the second half," said head coach Josh Buettner. "Adam shot the ball incredibly well from three and Owen and Trent did a great job in multiple aspects."

Read more at the Michigan Tech Athletics website.

Face Coverings Required Indoors on Campus

While Michigan Tech is at Health and Safety Level Two, face coverings must be worn indoors. This applies to all students, employees and visitors, regardless of vaccination status. 

Michigan Tech strongly recommends that all employees and students make choices to protect themselves, such as getting vaccinated, wearing high-filtration face coverings, and practicing enhanced sanitation and physical distancing where possible — especially in light of the increased transmissibility of the COVID-19 omicron variant. 

Please be aware that if you are exposed to COVID-19, quarantine guidelines vary depending on vaccination status. 

In Level Two, students and employees are not required to monitor their symptoms daily prior to coming to campus. But, individuals should be mindful of their own symptoms. A useful monitoring tool is available from the CDC.

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On-Demand COVID-19 Testing Available on Campus

Walk-in, on-demand COVID-19 testing is available to Michigan Tech students and employees during the spring 2022 semester.

Testing is available every week in the Rozsa Center basement Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. There is no cost to be tested, and no appointment is needed. 

The consent form is now online and can be completed anytime between 8:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on the day of your visit.

More COVID-19 Testing Information for the Michigan Tech community is available on the MTU Flex website.

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CTL Technical Workshops: New Canvas Quizzes

The Canvas Quiz assessment tool is changing. New Quizzes will eventually be the only option for creating quizzes in Canvas, and the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is hosting technical workshops where you can learn more about them.

Topics will include:

• How to enable New Quizzes in your Canvas courses.
• How to differentiate between New and Classic Quizzes.
• How to begin building New Quizzes.
• The new question types available, such as categorization, ordering, hot spot and a new option called stimulus where content can be provided for a group of questions.
• Some powerful new features for student moderation and accommodations.

Register to attend one of these CTL technical workshops and learn more about New Quizzes:

• Wednesday, Feb. 16 — 2-3 p.m.
  Register for this workshop.
  
  
• Tuesday, Feb. 22 — 2-3 p.m.
  Register for this workshop.

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Deadline for URS Research Submissions Extended

The Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS) research submissions deadline has been extended to Wednesday (Feb. 16) at 11:59 p.m. Please visit the Undergraduate Research Symposium website for more information regarding research submission and judging opportunities.

Students who have been funded by these programs are required to participate in this event as a part of their funding agreement:

• Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)
• Michigan Space Grant Consortium (MSGC)
• Undergraduate Research Internship Program (URIP)

Participation in the symposium is also open to all undergraduate students, providing them the opportunity to present posters describing completed or ongoing research and receive feedback from faculty judges.

The symposium will take place March 25 in the Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts lobby. Encourage your undergraduate student researchers to participate in this opportunity as a means to display their work and gain presentation experience. The symposium coincides with Tech's Preview Day and is a great way to share the exciting research projects going on across campus with high school students considering attending Michigan Tech. We encourage all faculty, staff and students to attend and support our excellent undergraduate researchers.

Questions can be directed to honors@mtu.edu.

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RTC Colloquium: Communicating, Misinformation, and Disinformation

The Department of Humanities announces a Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture (RTC) Colloquium featuring two talks  in the Rozsa Center lobby from 4-5:30 p.m. today (Feb. 14).

The colloquium is sponsored by BAD Info: Exploring How Mis/Disinformation Works and Why it Matters.

• Talk 1 — "Debugging misinformation on climate change: a study of UNESCO hashtags" presented by Ayodele James Akinola.
  
  From the abstract:
  Disinformation, a deliberate (often orchestrated) attempt to confuse or manipulate people through delivering dishonest information, has been one of the major threats to the 21st century's innovation in digital communication leading to misinformation. ... In this study, I examine the use of hashtags that originated from one of world’s most prominent organizations, the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization (UNESCO) as a reflection of their engagement with world citizens through the mechanism of social media. I focus on the subject of climate change using #ClimateChange, #SavethePlanet, and #SayNoToDistortion in order to identify how these hashtags are (being) engaged by “Twitterians”, Twitter users. 
  
  
• Talk 2 — "Fact-checking in a Developing Country: Reflections from a Ghanaian fact-checker" presented by Eugene Agyei.
  
  From the abstract:
  The past few years have witnessed the rise of mis/disinformation and fake news in Ghana. This in part is due to the advancement of digital media technologies and also a very youthful population in an aggressive political ecosystem. Social media users, influencers and blogs contribute to a large amount of mis/disinformation and fake news in the country. In extreme cases, these people are able to manipulate newsrooms whose journalists lack essential fact checking skills. Until recently, there were no established fact-checking newsrooms that were dedicated to verifying information regularly. ... The work of these organizations has been crucial in the fight against misinformation and fake news in the country which is, in turn, safeguarding democracy.

To have your event automatically appear, please submit them to the University Events Calendar.

Nominations for USG E-board and At-Large Representatives

Monday, February 14, 8–8 a.m. | Online

Do you or someone you know want to run as an At-Large representative or a member of USG's executive board? Nominations are now open for the election which begins February...

Youth Indoor Rock Climbing Spring 2022 Session 2

Monday, February 14, 4:00 p.m.–4:50 p.m. | Student Development Complex (SDC), Climbing Wall

Is your child looking for a new challenge? Sign up now for the OAP Youth Indoor Rock Climbing Class and let them climb our wall! We try to meet each participant at their level...

How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? Flow Dynamics in Arrhythmias

Monday, February 14, 6 p.m.

Husky Bites presents Special Guest Hoda Hatoum Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering Michigan Technological University Co-host Brennan Vogl '20 (PhD...

Monthly General Meeting _ Spring 2022

Monday, February 14, 6 p.m.–7 p.m. | Chem Sci. 211

Hi folks, This mail serves to notify us that we will be having our monthly general meeting on the last Wednesday of the month 6 - 7 PM at Chem Sci. 211 or via Zoom. Feel...

Open Rock Climbing

Monday, February 14, 6 p.m.–8 p.m. | Student Development Complex (SDC), Multipurpose Room Climbing Wall

All ages (we can allow all ages to climb as long as we have the proper fitting equipment). No need to sign up, just stop by the Climbing Wall between 6 and 8 pm Monday through...

College of Computing Hangout

Monday, February 14, 7 p.m.–8 p.m.

Join us to hear from the College of Computing! Faculty will share more information about the college, available majors, and answer any questions you may have.

Cricket Tournament Spring 2022

Monday, February 14, 10–12 a.m. | SDC Multipurpose Room

Cricket Club MTU in partnership with Indian Students Association (ISA) has organized Tennis Ball Cricket Tournament for boys. DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION: Sunday January 30,...

Searching Sideways Week

February 14, all day | J. Robert Van Pelt and John and Ruanne Opie Library

At the VPOL our aim is to help make you efficient and effective searchers so we are dedicating the week to sharing tools and methods that will elevate how you find...