IDG’s CIO has named the University of Alabama at Birmingham as a 2021 CIO 100 award winner for its innovative technology solutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the GuideSafe™ exposure notification app and hybrid classroom technology.
For more than 30 years, the CIO 100 awards have recognized innovative organizations around the world that exemplify the highest level of strategic and operational excellence in IT.
“This year’s CIO 100 class demonstrates an amazing array of initiatives,” said Anne McCrory, group vice president, Customer Experience and Operations, IDG Communications, Inc. “Many helped their organizations thrive during the dark days of the coronavirus pandemic, whether by directly addressing new realities in health care or business or by expediting digital adoption to adapt. We are honored to showcase these achievements and the spirit behind them at this year’s virtual CIO 100 Symposium & Awards in August.”
UAB’s submission for the awards showcased how the university led technology initiatives to ensure students, faculty, staff and fellow citizens were protected and thriving during the pandemic.
“These innovations brought UAB employees together to collaborate across disciplines to save lives, transform operations and help other organizations,” said Curtis A. Carver Jr., Ph.D., chief information officer and vice president for Information Technology. “We embraced that the pandemic presented unprecedented challenges. Our challenge was the breadth of different solutions needed to address these unprecedented challenges — not only for our campus but for our community and our state.”
Curtis A. Carver Jr., Ph.D.In addition to the GuideSafe™ exposure notification app — one of the first in the United States to use anonymous Google/Apple technology to notify users of possible exposure to COVID-19 — UAB supported 59 other institutions with the informatics portion of a statewide COVID testing program for incoming college students and supported development of the daily Healthcheck symptom tracker.
UAB also worked to narrow the digital divide for students in Birmingham and across the state with a free Wi-Fi app to help individuals find Wi-Fi hotspots across Alabama and offered free drive-in Wi-Fi on campus. Loaner laptops were offered to UAB students and deployed a large-scale virtual desktop infrastructure to open new models of hybrid and online education and support research.
To transform education, UAB reengineered lecture-capture and broadcast technologies for more than 225 classrooms and deployed 1,200 new Wi-Fi access points and building occupancy sensors to create safe study spaces on campus.
Executives from the winning companies will be recognized virtually at the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards.