Software that could save university research in 2020-21 academic year
It is the new year. It is for most academics. September is when energy and excitement return to campuses. Most working in universities typically feel more oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin for the academic new year than for the calendar new year. This year the excitement is accompanied by a great deal of a different type of hormone: cortisol. This anxiety hormone is largely related to the uncertainty around what is to come.
Academic leaders, faculty, staff, local communities, and some students and their families are worried that bringing thousands of people from different corners of the country and perhaps from across the international borders might be the next recipe for a healthcare disaster. In other words, this year the happy energy comes along with a potential threat if not replaced by it: Covid-19-carrying people meeting others in mass and spreading the disease dramatically. The impact on public health and local economies can be devastating. This is a hard reality to imagine given that citizens, business owners, and leaders involved have accepted much loss and have done a great deal of work so far to keep casualties at a minimum.
University research has been dramatically impacted due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
Most universities have adopted fully online or hybrid approaches for teaching and research since early March. Most adminustarton moved to virtual mode and might stay that way for the remainder of the year. Many are returning to some sense of normal operations now. While there are drastic differences among academic institutions in the approaches taken for reopening and in how they plan to handle any local outbreaks, one thing is in common. The administration support for staff and faculty to plan for health and safety and deal with any issues is for the most part inadequate. There are reports of strikes and vocal opposition to what is planned and is being expected.
Education is one of the sectors that have been hard hit by the global pandemic. While most speak about the effect on teaching, the other equally important component of an academic life, that is, research, is largely left ignored.
When COVID19 first hit, research laboratories on campuses around the world faced a series of tough questions relating to operating decisions. They had very little time or help to implement the right strategy. The result of this has been that the majority of laboratories and research facilities shut down while some had minimal operations going on (animal care, critical equipment maintenance, etc.), and some stayed open having measures in place to protect the health and safety of workers.
With some areas slowly lift or upgrade the required social distancing measures necessary to slow the spread of the virus, university research labs are now putting together plans to return to work in an entirely different environment. Some schools have left these sorts of decisions from a tactical viewpoint in the hands of individual professors and PIs (principal investigators) and some others have planned central pan-university processes directly overseen by high-level administration.
In both cases, the need for proper platform support is both clear and largely unfulfilled. While leaders and PIs need to plan well to avoid new campus community outbreaks, they also need systems in place to act efficiently when such reports surface. There are major issues in relation to both scheduling and compliance within the context of public health and quick recovery to normal.
To allow research to get back on its feet, to help graduate students to reduce delays in their thesis work and graduation timelines, and to allow academic discovery and development to resume, more people have been hired across various university departments. This is where technology and software will allow for scalability: do more, do better, and spend less.
One product, in particular, has seen unprecedented demand to do all of the above. Mesh AI is a global leader of “socially intelligent staff anti-scheduling”. A SaaS platform designed to be both easy to use and powerful enough to handle the most complicated staff scheduling issues for the healthcare sector, it has a history of very satisfied medical users going as far back as 2014.
With Mesh AI, pandemic-compliant scheduling is done in a matter of seconds. Be it times graduate students get access to a lab for their thesis work, necessary slots cleaning staff need to disinfect public surfaces, or shifts clinical and medical providers in university hospitals fill to provide care, Mesh AI uses its proprietary intelligent algorithms to find mathematically near-optimal solutions all the time. The beauty here is that Mesh AI accommodates fairness, equity, inclusion, and even preference issues of staff while guaranteeing managers and process owners are always in control, in the know, and that they get the people they need at the right time and right place. This is what augmented intelligence AI is all about.
And then when people need to be removed out of or reassigned to time slots or spaces (due to positive test results, etc.), Mesh AI uses the same intelligent algorithms to do what is being done in hours in a matter of seconds: use all the rules and constraints in place to find who is the right person.
Imagine a case where a PhD student is reported to be Covid-19-positive: you can again use Mesh AI to get a list of all who have shared spaces and times with her over the last 2 weeks and even inform them on the same platform in seconds. Reporting and analytics tools built in Mesh AI allow for very flexible reporting and compliance procedures for all stakeholders.
While Mesh AI is not the Covid-19 vaccine everyone is waiting for, it is a vaccine against the operational issues we all face today as we ought to balance public safety with a faster economic recovery.
PS. Contact Mesh AI at info@MeshAI.io for a demo and free trial if your unit is qualified. In recent weeks, their disappointing launch wait time has been reduced from 9 weeks to 1-2 weeks thanks to their major expansion and hirings in a number of areas. We hope that is true.