Following is a list of things BruinTechs should know and share with others:
1. 2023–24 Executive Board nominations are due today, August 4
Please consider yourself (many people nominate themselves!) or a colleague that would be a good fit for the following positions which have thus far received either one or no nominations: bruintech.ucla.edu/nominate
President-Elect (will be President in 2024-25)
Vice President for Community Events
Vice President for Marketing Communications
Vice President for Special Projects
We’re also still happy to accept nominations for:
Vice President for Technology Support
Vice President for Content Strategy
Member-at-Large
Learn more about the BruinTech Executive Board positions
2. Business Continuity: UC Ready Open Office Hours
Via Zoom
11AM-12PM PST
August 17 2023
Join via Zoom here
Some of you expressed an interest in learning to navigate the UC Ready site and talking to others working on updating their continuity plan. Join us anytime via Zoom between 11am-12pm on 8/17/23 for open office hours. Tara Brown, Senior Business Continuity Planner, can answer questions about your continuity plan and to help you to navigate the UC Ready site. Or feel free to stop by to say hello!
3. UCSD - LEAN in Higher Ed conference
No matter what we do, Continuous Improvement has become an integral part of our jobs! If you want to take your Lean journey to the next level, consider this opportunity to connect with Lean thought leaders and enthusiasts at the Lean in Higher Education annual conference hosted at UC San Diego!
The University of California San Diego is honored to host the 2023 Lean in Higher Education International Conference, October 18-20, 2023. We are excited to bring our Lean HE global community back together in person for the first time in four years! We hope you will join us “On the Edge...” in our beautiful facility, at the UC San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
This annual conference provides unparalleled opportunities for attendees to share insights and solutions regarding continuous improvement to bring about increased effectiveness and efficiency and thereby support the transformative power of Higher Education.
The group rate is available to any UC attendees at $595 (cheaper than early bird $680)!!
4. GPT-3 can reason about as well as a college student, UCLA psychologists report
People solve new problems readily without any special training or practice by comparing them to familiar problems and extending the solution to the new problem. That process, known as analogical reasoning, has long been thought to be a uniquely human ability.
But now people might have to make room for a new kid on the block.
Research by UCLA psychologists shows that, astonishingly, the artificial intelligence language model GPT-3 performs about as well as college undergraduates when asked to solve the sort of reasoning problems that typically appear on intelligence tests and standardized tests such as the SAT. The study is published in Nature Human Behaviour.
5. Introducing the UC Tech Engagement Committee
The CIO Council (formerly the IT Leadership Council), established a new working group in April 2023, called the UC Tech Engagement Committee. The purpose of the committee, with representation from different UC locations, is to help guide system wide initiatives that engage – connect, strengthen, and grow – the broad tech and tech-adjacent community across UC. We’re calling this the “UC Tech community.”
Inclusivity is the goal, and the UC Tech community is broadly defined as people across the University of California who work in central or distributed IT organizations, who serve as technology specialists in other functional units, or who have roles that support the technology function.
The UC Tech Engagement committee is co-chaired by me, Mojgan Amini, from UC San Diego; and Yvonne Tevis and Kristin Cordova, respectively the former and current chief of staffs of Information Technology Services at UCOP. The committee has spent the last number of months developing a charter, expanding membership (approved by each location’s CIO), and working on several initiatives that will hopefully create a good foundation for encouraging our community’s deep involvement in and contributions to system wide initiatives.
