Monthly Archives: November 2020

Michigan Medicine SharePoint upgrade: Learning opportunities, development freeze, community of practice

By | November 30, 2020
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SharePoint Online logo

Michigan Medicine is upgrading its existing Microsoft SharePoint 2016 environment to SharePoint Online, a cloud-based service that will provide new opportunities for teams to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications. Pilots and testing are happening now, and HITS plans to introduce SharePoint Online across all of Michigan Medicine beginning in early 2021. In addition to significantly improving the… Read More »

Support for Sophos Antivirus on UM-owned machines to end December 2020

By | November 30, 2020
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A laptop with a magnifying glass and a shield hovering over it.

Support for Sophos Antivirus installed on U-M machines will end on December 31, 2020. Enhanced Endpoint Protection powered by CrowdStrike replaces Sophos. The Sophos product will continue to work, but will not be updated, and quickly will become deprecated. If you are responsible for managing university Macs, please ensure that you transition them to CrowdStrike Falcon for endpoint… Read More »

Engineering undergrads prep for a modern workforce with expanded data analytics courses and support

By | November 25, 2020
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many graphs and magnifying glass on dark blue background

In 2018, U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) faculty set their sights on fully-preparing students for the modern workforce and advanced studies by incorporating computing and data analytics into many existing courses, creating a new advanced analytics course for seniors, and implementing a new help desk to support students. One of the main changes was to emphasize R and Python… Read More »

Young kids’ YouTube viewing dominated by consumerism, ads

By | November 24, 2020
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young boy watching YouTube on a tablet

A recent report by Michigan Medicine and non-profit Common Sense Media finds children are often consuming pervasive and inappropriate advertising, violence, and other questionable content while watching online videos. Children ages eight and under are now spending more time on YouTube than ever before, with online video viewing for the first time surpassing live television and streaming video… Read More »

2020 CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition highlights outstanding research

By | November 23, 2020
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CSE wordmark

Computer Science And Engineering held its seventeenth annual CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition on November 11, 2020. The competition recognizes the research done by PhD students at CSE and the final competition is the culmination of a process that narrows a field of entrants to a handful of finalists, each of whom gives a summary presentation on an… Read More »

Democratizing genetic data for cancer research

By | November 20, 2020
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graphic showing to people icons next to DAN strings.

By distilling information from hundreds of data sources, U-M Precision Health researchers have launched an open-access, online repository called Cancer PRSWeb that will help accelerate advancements in cancer prevention and prediction. The researchers created polygenic risk scores (PRS) for 35 cancer traits and then evaluated the scores using electronic health record data from the Michigan Genomics Initiative and the… Read More »

UM-Dearborn’s artificial intelligence center having great first year

By | November 20, 2020
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DAIR logo

U-M Dearborn founded the Dearborn Artificial Intelligence Research Center less than a year ago with a strategy of “think big, start small, and scale fast.” Organizers have already made impressive progress toward making AI one of Dearborn’s topline areas for research, education, and industry collaboration. Over the past year, several DAIR Center projects have won funding and the… Read More »

Dearborn prof’s wearable technology improves at-home physical therapy

By | November 19, 2020
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African American man doing exercise with a dumbell

Samir Rawashdeh, UM-Dearborn assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a colleague have developed RehabBuddy, a physical therapy system that employs a wearable sensor that records a “map” of the correct movement of exercises. The RehabBuddy system starts with an in-person visit to a physical therapist. The patient wears a small sensor that records a “map” of… Read More »

Epic MegaGrant will support development of XR projects

By | November 18, 2020
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U-M’s Extended Reality (XR) Initiative, a part of the Center for Academic Innovation, received $120,000 from an Epic Games MegaGrant. CAI will use the funds to hire 20-30 student fellows over the next two years and educate them in different tools and processes like Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by the company Epic Games. “While the university has… Read More »

New tool automates popular system security technique

By | November 18, 2020
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illustration of sandbox with shovel over computer code background

Working with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Xinyu Wang, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, co-authored an award-winning paper that demonstrates how to automatically build sandboxing policies to keep a computer system safe. Sandboxing is a software management strategy that isolates applications from critical system resources and other programs. One common sandbox approach… Read More »

‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

By | November 17, 2020
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screenshot of europe map with Poland highlighted

Navigate this 3D world map by clicking, holding and dragging the mouse cursor. See how censorship levels range around the globe. The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A U-M team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking system launched… Read More »

First digital single-chip millimeter-wave beamformer will exploit 5G capabilities

By | November 17, 2020
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The first fully-integrated single-chip digital millimeter-wave (MMW) beamformer, created by electrical and computer engineers at U-M, opens up new possibilities in high-frequency 5G communications. The technology could be used to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communication, autonomous driving, satellite internet, and national defense, to name a few. Beamforming allows a device that is transmitting signals to point them in a particular… Read More »

Jason Flinn honored with 2020 Mark Weiser Award

By | November 16, 2020
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Jason Flinn

Jason Flinn, professor of computer science and engineering, has been recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) with the 2020 Mark Weiser Award, a preeminent honor in the field of operating systems. The award recognizes a career of contributions “that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark… Read More »

U-M Data Science Annual Symposium covers wide range of topics

By | November 13, 2020
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MIDAS logo

The Michigan Institute for Data Science held its Data Science Annual Symposium Tuesday, November 10 and Wednesday, November 11. The keynote featured Lauren Klein, English professor at Emory University, and Catherine D’Ignazio, urban science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The pair discussed their book, “Data Feminism,” published last February. Klein and D’Ignazio introduced what they call the… Read More »

Ad-free, censorship-free social sites MeWe, Parler see surge in interest postelection

By | November 12, 2020
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Close-up Photography of Smartphone Icons

Since the Nov. 3 election, people—particularly President Trump supporters—have been flocking to social media platforms Parler and MeWe, which promise ad-free or uncensored experiences. MeWe’s promise is “Your private life is not 4Sale: No ads. No Spyware. No BS.” Parler calls itself “the world’s town square,” inviting participants to “speak freely and express yourself openly.” Libby Hemphill, associate… Read More »

HITS announces the rollout of eduroam across Michigan Medicine; improvements to MWireless-UMHS

By | November 11, 2020
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Wifi_icon2

Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) is excited to announce changes and improvements to two of its WiFi networks across Michigan Medicine in November. Michigan Medicine began offering eduroam on November 9 across all of its buildings, including NCRC, the medical school, hospitals and clinics. The eduroam service is a dual band network that allows visitors from other… Read More »

New ERN trainings announced for November and December

By | November 11, 2020
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Person walking into a ledger type notebook

Throughout November and December 2020, HITS is partnering with LabArchives to offer unique Electronic Research Notebook (ERN) training opportunities to the U-M community. Two types of training sessions will be offered. The first is an introductory session for researchers to provide basic and refresher information for new and current users. The second session is specifically for educators and… Read More »

Password tip: Use a unique password for every site and service

By | November 10, 2020
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A computer monitor with multiple instances of the word "password"

Here is an important password tip: Do not reuse your UMICH (Level-1) password. Try to set a unique password for each site and online service you use (or use a password manager), and never use your UMICH password for non-university accounts or services. Reusing passwords puts you at risk. There have been a number of data breaches outside… Read More »

COVID-19 research leverages machine learning and high-performance computing

By | November 9, 2020
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A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site. The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, Ph.D., associate professor of physics. The modeling uses a machine learning algorithm that can forecast future COVID-19 cases and deaths. The weekly predictions are made using the ARC-TS Great Lakes High-Performance Computing Cluster, which provides the speed and dexterity to run the modeling algorithms and data analysis needed for data-informed decisions that affect public health. Each week, 51 processes (one for each state and one for the U.S.) are run in parallel (at the same time). “Running all 51 analyses on our own computers would take an extremely long time. The analysis places heavy demands on the hardware running the computations, which makes crashes somewhat likely on a typical laptop. We get all 51 done in the time it would take to do 1,” said Corsetti. “It is our goal to provide accurate data that helps our country.” The predictions for the U.S. at the national and state levels are fed into the COVID-19 Forecasting Hub, which is led by the UMass-Amherst Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence based at the Reich Lab. The weekly predictions generated by the hub are then read out by the CDC for their weekly forecast updates Center for Disease Control (CDC) COVID-19 Forecasting Hub. The second project, a risk tracking site, involves COVID-19 data-acquisition from a Johns Hopkins University repository and the Michigan Safe Start Map. This is done on a daily basis, and the process runs quickly. It only takes about five minutes, but the impact is great. The data populates the COVID-19 risk tracking site for the State of Michigan that shows by county the total number of COVID-19 cases, the average number of new cases in the past week, and the risk level. “Maintaining the risk tracking site requires us to reliably update its data every day. We have been working on implementing these daily updates using Great Lakes so that we can ensure that they happen at the same time each day. These updates consist of data pulls from the Michigan Safe Start Map (for risk assessments) and the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data repository (for case counts),” remarked Corsetti. “We are proud to support this type of impactful research during the global pandemic,” said Brock Palen, director of Advanced Research Computing - Technology Services. “Great Lakes provides quicker answers and optimized support for simulation, machine learning, and more. It is designed to meet the demands of the University of Michigan’s most intensive research.” ARC-TS is a division of Information and Technology Services (ITS). Related information U-M senior’s COVID-19 data model reaches CDC Student’s COVID-19 data model reaches CDC

A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site.  The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, associate professor of… Read More »