Foundation Relations

March 10 is Giving Blueday

stuxbury — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 18:43:00 +0000

March 10 is Giving Blueday stuxbury Mon, 03/08/2021 - 13:43

Living in a Los Angeles mid-century modern home surrounded by palm trees, Alumnus Gary Wohlleben’s life today looks almost nothing like it did when he was a ��-Dearborn student.

And that’s why he gives on Giving Blueday.

“I wouldn’t be sitting here in this beautiful home in California if it wasn’t for the campus internship program, so I make a point to support it every year,” says first-generation college student Wohlleben, ‘66 B.B.A., who went out to California after graduation and used his ��-Dearborn business degree to start his career in Hollywood as a producer and financial controller. “When I went to NBC for my interview, luck would have it that the person interviewing me was a Michigan graduate too.”

Giving Blueday 2021, which will take place all-day Wednesday, is an opportunity for the ��-Dearborn community to come together and support what they love about campus. During the last Giving Blueday, nearly $100,000 was raised for campus causes like scholarships, centers, student organizations and more.

"Giving Blueday is a chance for a lot of people to make a difference together," said Annual Giving Director Eva Gogola. As an added incentive, there are social media challenges and gift matches. "Philanthropy is personal, but I think it should also be fun. We've really embraced that at ��-Dearborn."

For example, Gogola said there is a Giving Brewday Alumni Challenge where people post a photo on social media of themselves with a favorite brew (coffee, tea, beer, etc.) and use #GivingBrewday2021. Each hour from 4 to 7 p.m., one participant will be selected and will win $1,000 directed to the ��-Dearborn fund of their choice.

Photo of Gary Wohlleben, Bert Meza and pup Guinness

If Wohlleben — who’s worked on television shows like Little House of the Prairie and animated movies like the Shrek and Despicable Me series — participates in the challenge, he and husband Bert Meza could take a photo with Guinness, their pint-sized Welsh Corgi pup that’s a favorite in their home.

Over a Zoom call, Wohlleben shared interesting behind-the-scenes stories from popular movies and shows. The donkey in Shrek was modeled after a miniature one in Palo Alto named Perry. Wohlleben said the late actor Michael Landon was inspiring in how he balanced family, filming and growing his career into writing and producing: “He told me, ‘If you don’t put yourself out there and try, how will you know if you'd be any good?’” And when Wohlleben was tasked with finding ways to make the most out of the production budget, which was often his role in the operation, he relied on his education from ��-Dearborn.

“In all steps of my career, I always went back to one class in particular, The Theory of Accounting. So much of what I needed to know on making things financially work came from that class. My education has helped me for 50 years. That’s a pretty good return on investment,” said Wohlleben, who recently retired.

Knowing the doors that education opens, Wohlleben and Meza make it a point to connect with campus on Giving Blueday. They give to areas that promote experiential learning like COB’s Internship and Career Management Center and that support identity affirmation like ��-Dearborn’s LGBTQ+ Programs and Initiatives.

“I want students to continue to have these opportunities. We need to support what once supported us so it doesn’t go away,” Wohlleben said. “We all start from somewhere. And I consider Michigan as the place that helped me get to where I am today. That’s why I give.”

Institutional Advancement

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Mon, 03/08/2021 - 18:40

For 24 hours, the entire university will come together and support the causes that make us the leaders and best. One of campus’ Wolverines — who’s worked for NBC, Dreamworks and Illumination Entertainment — shares why he gives.

Giving Blueday 2021

Mapping for the future

stuxbury — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 23:48:01 +0000

Mapping for the future stuxbury Wed, 02/10/2021 - 18:48

Photo of the GIS Ford C3 student group with Professor Jacob Napieralski

A group of ��-Dearborn students are creating a plan to help a Metro Detroit community see the future — or, more accurately, get a visual of it.

Five students in Geology Professor Jacob Napieralski’s Geographic Information System (GIS) capstone course are working with Dearborn city government, non-profit organizations and community groups creating digital maps to assist with the expansion of the city’s tree canopy, evaluate locations for city bike lanes and more.

“These students genuinely care and want to leave a footprint on their community before they graduate — it goes beyond a grade,” he says. “They are applying the knowledge they’ve gained at ��-Dearborn to create potential sustainable solutions. Yes, they want to gain experience. But they also want to help.”

Napieralski says the students have worked with Dearborn for previously funded projects like mapping data to help city organizers know where to best add safety measures like crosswalks. And thanks to the support from a $25,000 Ford College Community Challenge (Ford C3) grant, Napieralski’s students will keep the mapping momentum going for city-related planning projects. ��-Dearborn is one of seven universities across the nation selected for the award.

The Ford C3 funds will help students develop potential data platforms — for example, one idea is to create an app to help residents identify tree types and upload images of trees in public spaces — and give the undergraduates a research stipend.

“I am grateful for this grant and the opportunity it offers to expand upon the work we were doing,” says Geological Sciences major Julia Hozak. Urban and Regional Studies and Geological Sciences double major Gina Boyanowski.adds, “GIS combines my interest in the urban environment, urban design and my love of communicating with visual art. I’m excited to be a part of this effort.”

Napieralski says ��-Dearborn’s Office of Metropolitan Impact is heavily involved in moving the projects forward. OMI Director Tracy Hall and her team connect students with community partners, help students prepare for meetings, and continue to facilitate conversations when needed.

“We are a public institution and it is critical that we address issues of public concern. OMI is often behind-the-scenes establishing relationships to help mutually beneficial projects like these happen,” Hall says. “This is a really wonderful thing because it gives our students the opportunity to practice active citizenship. The grant allows students to support our city through Ford’s investment in its hometown at the university Ford founded.”

The student groups are in the early planning stage. Actively pushing forward, they meet via Zoom weekly to give updates, brainstorm ideas, and discuss next steps. In a remote meeting on a Wednesday evening in January, each shared their project focus.

Boyanowski wants to help with the implementation of the city's multi-modal transportation efforts. Through using GIS spatial analysis and/or creating interactive maps, she’ll help people visualize current and future projects and potential efficiencies. One idea is to map road construction timing with identified areas for bike lanes so efforts are streamlined.

Hozak and Environmental Science major Rebecca Zasadny are teaming up to look at ways to map Dearborn’s tree canopy, create a tree inventory, and identify how to best mark ideal tree planting locations. “GIS allows for a full visualization of urban areas and potential green areas as well. My focus on this project is to optimize areas in Dearborn that could benefit from tree planting and my hope is that this project can be a starting point in bringing nature closer to the residents.” The city is proud of its 30-year Arbor Day Foundation Tree City USA designation and continues to prioritize tree planting.

The team of Environmental Science major Abby Jenkins and Geological Sciences major Kelsey Young continue to seek data so they can digitally map and analyze flood hazards in the city to identify vulnerable areas. “I've always been interested in studying the impacts of environmental and geologic hazards on local communities — and GIS is an exceptional way to visualize and conduct a study,” says Young, who is also earning a GIS Certificate.

The students, working with city leaders, want to enhance neighborhoods across the city. But Napieralski says special focus will be on Dearborn’s Southend neighborhood, which is tucked between the Ford Rouge Factory and the city of Detroit.

Napieralski says the neighborhood is “literally on the other side of tracks” and isolated from the rest of the city of Dearborn because it’s surrounded by railways and industry. He remarked that pedestrian routes are so disconnected that there are no direct biking or walking paths to schools.

“It’s important to explore ways to provide opportunities. Residents in the Southend are economically distressed and have lower educational attainment compared to residents in other Dearborn neighborhoods,” he says. “We wanted to focus on mobility issues and public spaces — and would like to start there since it’s much needed.”

Napieralski, who serves as a mentor for these projects, says the process is student-driven with one of the Ford C3 grant’s goals being student leadership.

He says the seniors are ready for the challenge and they are planning ahead so they can have a lasting impact. Each team’s product will be in a format that can easily be handed over to the city or future upper-level GIS students and expanded and updated as information and project goals change.

“We believe in giving our students real-world experience so they are prepared when they graduate. But we also want them to understand the importance of the work,” Napieralski says. “It’s about improving the quality of life. It’s about having a long term impact. These students get that.”

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In addition to the Ford C3 grant, these GIS projects are made possible by a variety of partnerships in the community and at ��-Dearborn. Beyond those mentioned in the story, partners include ACCESS, Friends of the Rouge, Environmental Interpretive Center, Dearborn City Council and Healthy Dearborn.

Experiential Learning

Sustainability

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Geospatial Analysis and Mapping (GAM) Lab

Natural Sciences

Foundation Relations

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Wed, 02/10/2021 - 23:45

The city of Dearborn and Professor Jacob Napieralski's advanced GIS students are working together — through the aid of a $25,000 Ford College Community Challenge grant — to map and increase Dearborn's tree canopy, understand flood hazards, and streamline

More than a history lesson

stuxbury — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 23:56:41 +0000

More than a history lesson stuxbury Mon, 01/25/2021 - 18:56

A star of David held by a student who is interested in learning about the Holocaust

Experts from around the world — from the past and today — will teach students need-to-know lessons from the Holocaust.

Through a $20,000 Ravitz Foundation grant, History Lecturer and Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive director Jamie Wraight is creating a full-feature online experience for the History 387: Aspects of the Holocaust course by using archived expert lectures, Holocaust survivor testimony from ��-Dearborn’s archive collection, internationally renowned speakers on the World War II genocide, and more. The class, currently offered once a year, will now be offered, twice thanks to the grant.

Wraight,says the class attracts students from across disciplines — art, engineering, business and health. He says part of the attraction is related to curiosity about the Holocaust. But there is also the understanding that this goes beyond learning about a past event — and awareness is important because people across culture and industry can be affected.

“This is bigger than a history class. I emphatically make the point that this is cross discipline,” says Wraight, who notes that the course is a popular choice among students and often has a waiting list. “Without the tech know-how of engineers, there wouldn’t have been gas chambers. Economic forces contributed to propaganda against the Jews and later they became economically exploited in concentration camps through slave labor. Genocide is an obvious public health concern. And there was the criminal justice angle about the involvement of the German police and legal profession, as well as what happens to the perpetrators after the war. All areas of society were impacted by this atrocity.”

To honor International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Wednesday, Wraight said Natalia Aleksiun, associate professor of Modern Jewish History, the Touro College Graduate School of Jewish Studies, will present, “Intimate Violence: Jewish Testimonies about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.”The lecture will be recorded and made available to those unable to attend.

Wraight says he took over directing the Voice/Vision archive from Professor Emeritus Sidney Bolkosky, who was among the first researchers to interview Holocaust survivors in an effort to document their experiences. Through Bolkosky’s work, the Voice/Vision archive has more than 300 first-hand accounts of life during World War II’s systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children.

Bolkosky, who taught on campus from 1972-2012, was also a campus pioneer in remote learning — sending videos of his lectures to students in ��-Dearborn’s REACH program, a distance-learning initiative that started in the late 1980s. Bolkosky died in 2013.

“I have several DVDs of Sid’s lectures from what Sid recorded for the REACH program. He was masterful in talking about survivor testimony — he interviewed many of them before (Steven) Spielberg did — and the survivors who talked to him after remarked that they told Sid more. If our students can hear from one of the best in the field — someone who was right here on our campus — they should hear about it from him. Not only will this benefit the people taking this class, it also honors Sid’s memory.”

Wraight says Ravitz family members, who oversee the foundation, were familiar with Bolkosky’s work. And because of the reputation the ��-Dearborn archive has, they came to campus in 2019 to explore ways they could help expand Holocaust education. Several options were explored, but COVID-19 moving communal activities online helped Wraight see the value of an expanded virtual course any interested person could take from anywhere. He also says it’s a living course, which means it will be updated regularly.

“We have a highly notable archive — we have shared what we have on campus with Yale and the Holocaust Museum in Washington. D.C. — so why not make our resources available to anyone, no matter where they are? We can connect students to survivor testimonies, recognized experts from across the world and actress time,” Wraight says.

He says developing the new course is a collaborative effort. In addition to the Ravitz Foundation, the ��-Dearborn staff in the HUB for Teaching and Learning, College of Arts, Sciences, & Letters Media Studio and the Mardigian Library, as well as several ��-Dearborn faculty colleagues are bringing the project to life.

“Even during a pandemic, no one — when I asked for their time — flinched. They want to get this project ready for our students,” says Wraight, who remarked that the project is underway and will be complete by May. “My colleagues see the importance of a learning opportunity like this. The more we learn, the more we are aware of the behaviors and environment that led to this taking place.”

He says the Holocaust may be history — but cautions what is old can be made new again. He says lessons from the Holocaust education aren’t uplifting; but they are important.

“Pay attention to the world or around you. Not all people were actively persecuting the Jews. But they didn’t stop it either — they stayed in their own bubble and later regretted it,” Wraight says. “Having a healthy dose of skepticism about the information you receive is a good thing. The more we know, the more we can rely on our knowledge to stand up to injustices we may see.”

Online Learning

Student Success

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Foundation Relations

Voice / Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

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Mon, 01/25/2021 - 23:54

��-Dearborn's Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive was awarded a $20,000 Ravitz Grant to expand a history course on the Holocaust.

Humans evolved from group hunters to civic rule creators: Do other primates have these capacities for cooperation?

stuxbury — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 17:12:28 +0000

Humans evolved from group hunters to civic rule creators: Do other primates have these capacities for cooperation? stuxbury Mon, 11/30/2020 - 12:12

Are shared intentions — such as dividing labor fairly or communicating to solve shared social dilemmas — the key ingredient of human culture and sociality? And do these abilities or what they evolved from exist in other animals?

These questions are at the center of Associate Professor Francine Dolins’ latest research project, The Cognitive Foundation of Social Minds, which received more than $1 million from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The interdisciplinary project includes the fields of comparative psychology, biological anthropology, artificial intelligence (AI), linguistics and computer science.

Photo of CASL Associate Professor Francine Dolins with a brown lemur

Dolins and her colleagues’ are examining primates — bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans — to see if they have the ability to see themselves and act as “we.” To test this, the behavioral scientists are designing virtual systems so that these apes have the opportunity to display their ability to cooperate through we-intentions, which is the intentional sharing of tasks like dividing labor.

“Although many species engage in joint action (two or more individuals acting toward a shared goal), evidence has previously suggested that only humans possess shared we-intentions that flexibly support intentional joint action,” Dolins says. “Young human children show the ability to carry out intentionally shared tasks. But what if primates have this ability and we just don’t know how to recognize it or have not been able to provide them with the opportunity to show this?”

But — when asking these questions — how do you find answers?

Dolins and her research team colleagues will examine the way bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans interact with each other using virtual avatars in solving cooperative problems such as hunting. From Dolins’ previous research work, she knew that bonobos, chimpanzees, humans and artificial intelligence agents can rapidly learn to navigate in virtual environments. So the team created virtual reality mini-worlds with built-in cooperation challenges.

Using controlled, systematic and repeated exposure in various virtual reality scenarios and analyzing intentional behavior choices from participants from each primate group, Dolins will analyze the choices made in the VR scenarios, the communication between individuals playing these ‘cooperation’ games, the motivations behind those choices, and how the different types of cooperation may have developed.

“It’s part of the timeless endeavor to understand ourselves and our place in the natural world,” she says. “As we look to a future with new ‘species’ of computational minds (e.g., AI agents), the ancient questions about our relationship to nature are profoundly transformed into new and more general questions — questions that this project begins to prepare us for.”

Through the evidence gathered using these VR tools, the team will look for the bridges that may exist between the kinds of social intelligences human and nonhuman apes possess, and that AI agents may develop, while also characterizing the cognitive traits necessary to possess these we-intentional cooperative problem-solving skills.

“What enabled humans to go from group hunting of prey to creating complex civic rules like democratic voting? Our project seeks to reverse engineer human and non-human primate capacities for cooperation from VR experiments that have been carefully engineered to reveal previously hidden commonalities and differences.”

Dolins research collaborators include J. Call, J. Tenenbaum, R. Lewis, M. Kleiman-Weiner and L. Schweller

Faculty Research

Research

Research Core Pages

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Behavioral Sciences

Foundation Relations

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Mon, 11/30/2020 - 17:10

CASL professor receives $1M grant for project looking to reverse engineer behavior to better understand humans, our primate cousins, and to prepare for future artificial intelligence development.

Photo of Teco, a 9 year old bonobo, who is participating in Professor Francine Dolins research