In late September, Mars Fernandez-Burgos, a doctoral student in counseling psychology at the University of Miami, received a one-line email from the assistant to the school's dean of students. She and eight others were asked to attend a Zoom meeting to discuss the "incident that happened on September 4." Fernandez-Burgos is a member of the University of Miami Employee Student Alliance (UMESA). Weeks earlier, she attended a campus protest around Covid protections and sick pay for contract workers like cafeteria workers and janitors. Afterward, university officials had ignored the student's group's attempts for a meeting. She didn't understand why the dean was reaching out now. "I believe this discussion necessary to understand policies around use of university space," wrote dean of students Ryan Holmes.

The Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Dataa (IMFD) started its operations in June 2018, funded by the Millennium Science Initiative of the Chilean National Agency of Research and Development.b IMFD is a joint initiative led by Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica de Chile, with the participation of five other Chilean universities: Universidad de Concepción, Universidad de Talca, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Universidad Diego Portales, and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. IMFD aims to be a reference center in Latin America related to state-of-the-art research on the foundational problems with data, as well as its applications to tackling diverse issues ranging from scientific challenges to complex social problems. As tasks of this kind are interdisciplinary by nature, IMFD gathers a large number of researchers in several areas that include traditional computer science areas such as data management, Web science, algorithms and data structures, privacy and verification, information retrieval, data mining, machine learning, and knowledge representation, as well as some areas from other fields, including statistics, political science, and communication studies. IMFD currently hosts 36 researchers, seven postdoctoral fellows, and more than 100 students.

This is a continuation of Carlos Rivero's interview with Ask the CIO: SLED Edition on June 25. Last week during my interview with Carlos Rivero, the Commonwealth of Virginia's first chief data officer (CDO), I opined that the growing establishment of state CDO positions across the country reminded me somewhat of the creation of the state chief information officer position back in the mid-1990s. It's gradually becoming commonplace as half the states now have a CDO. In addition, the position's placement within the state organizational hierarchy also continues to evolve with about half reporting to the state CIO while the other half are located within the states' "administration secretariat." Rivero's initial task as CDO likewise reminded me of the role that I and other state CIOs faced during the Y2K drill some two decades ago.

The little white robot on wheels began its journey outside Blaze Pizza. Hanging a quick right, the machine rolled past groups of hurried students, over sidewalk cracks and twigs, down a ramp, up a hill, and across a two-lane street -- pausing briefly to "look" for cars. Fifteen minutes after departing, the robot arrived outside Commonwealth Hall, a freshman dorm on the northwest side of the George Mason University campus, where Shamor Williams was waiting. The hungry 19-year-old had never ordered lunch from a robot before, but the Internet technology major operated like a pro. Casually opening the device's lid with his smartphone, he removed a 10-inch cheese pizza, pausing only to reflect upon his novel encounter with a semiautonomous machine when asked.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - One of the best ways to find breast cancer is through mammography, but like any technology, it's not foolproof and there are cancers that could be overlooked. That's what motivated Anabetsy Rivero to develop a software program that can improve the accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis. While earning her master's degree in computer science at Nova Southeastern University, Rivero created a program that can detect microscopic changes in breast tissue, pixel by pixel. "The human eye is very good at determining patterns, but what happens is some of these patterns are microscopic, and it's very difficult for the human eye to detect differences on the pixel level," Rivero said. "And these programs are able to determine that in real time so that the doctors can practice more patient-centric medicine rather than spending hours behind the screen looking for these patterns."