On July 16, 2019, Systemwide Chief Information Officer Tom Andriola announced the winners of the 2019 Larry L. Sautter Awards at the UCTech Conference in Santa Barbara. Eight teams, representing all UC locations, were recognized for using information technology to make university operations more effective and efficient in order to better serve faculty, staff, students and patients.
These annual awards, which were established in 2000, honor Larry L. Sautter, a former UC Riverside associate vice chancellor for computing and communications who passed away in 1999. Under Sautter’s leadership, UC Riverside implemented a modern data network, client-server computing and improved technical support services.
Sponsored by the UC Information Technology Leadership Council, the Sautter Awards recognize collaborative innovations in IT that advance the university’s missions of teaching, research, public service and patient care, or that improve the effectiveness of university processes. The awards encourage collaboration and solution-sharing across the UC system. Projects must be active and operational at a campus to qualify.
Congratulations to the 2019 award winners and honorable mentions!
Golden Awards
- Street Story – A Platform for Community Engagement (UC Berkeley) is a community-engagement tool that allows residents and community organizations to collect information about transportation collisions, near-misses, general hazards and safe locations to travel. The platform and information collected are free to use and publicly accessible.
- Data Science/Machine Learning Platform – DSMLP (UC San Diego) meets a growing need of graduate and undergraduate students for high-end computation resources. It provides an affordable CPU/GPU cluster for coursework, formal independent study, student research and special projects.
- Systemwide Collaboration on Accessibility: The Siteimprove Implementation Project (all UC locations) represents a collaborative systemwide effort to select, purchase and implement resources at all UC locations to help make public-facing websites accessible to people with disabilities. These resources are the Siteimprove web accessibility tool, which monitors websites, and 14 e-courses focused on accessibility.
Silver Awards
- UC Code Creators Build SiteFarm and Community (UCSF, UC Davis and UCLA) is a collaboration through which UC code creators from several campuses developed a community of practice and implemented a shared Drupal web publishing platform. Participating campuses have achieved cost savings and benefited from standardized practices.
- PRISMS Asthma mHealth Research Study Ecosystem (UCLA) is a mobile system for collecting research data on pediatric asthma patients. It uses mobile phones and integrated-sensor monitoring systems to capture research data in the field, right after subjects have an asthma attack.
Honorable Mentions
- The UC Clinical Trials Network (UC Health) currently powers websites for six UC institutions to help patients, doctors, caregivers and researchers find and connect with clinical trials. The goal is to promote clinical research across UC Health and enable rapid recruitment for participation in trials.
- Article 26 Backpack: Tech as an Educational Lifeline for Refugees (UC Davis) is a cloud-based platform to help refugees document and share their personal stories and educational credentials to reclaim their right to education. More than 600 refugees have created accounts through the platform to date.
- Compass: Comprehensive Analytics for Student Success (UC Irvine) uses business intelligence tools to provide faculty and administrators quick, convenient access to student data. Users generate reports based on real-time aggregate information, which can reveal opportunities for outreach and intervention to improve student outcomes.
For more information on each project, read the applications at the Sautter Award Program website.