Author Archives: News Staff
When President Mark Schlissel announced last month that the balance of the winter semester would be conducted in alternate, virtual forms as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, all university units were quick to respond. Information and Technology Services had been actively preparing for such a situation for almost a month, in partnership with university leadership and IT leaders… Read More »
On March 9, Michigan Medicine treated its first COVID-19 patient, one of two in the state, prompting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to mandate that non-essential workers “Stay Home and Stay Safe.” To Michigan Medicine ambulatory care clinics, this meant deferring all in-person, non-critical appointments and elective surgeries, creating a backlog of appointments that pushed virtual care to the forefront.… Read More »
The Collabrify Roadmap Platform, a set of free, customizable digital learning tools developed by the Center for Digital Curricula at the College of Engineering, provides K-12 teachers with scheduling templates that can be customized to include all the activities that would normally take place in their classrooms. Created last summer as a supplemental tool to make educational resources… Read More »
To find out why people adopt and then sometimes abandon online safety measures, researchers from the School of Information surveyed more than 900 people about their use of 30 commonly recommended practices to guard against security, privacy, and identity theft risks. The team found that security practices like avoiding clicking on unknown links or emails were much more… Read More »
On any given day in Kevin Fu’s laboratory at the College of Engineering research investigators might use an antenna to fool the lab’s sensor into giving a false temperature readings or a laser light beam to inject false voice commands in a voice-controlled assistant from a distance of 300 feet. Unlike many cybersecurity troubleshooters, Fu is not looking… Read More »
Social scientists have identified 10 dimensions to describe the nature of human relationships but little research has focused on how these concepts are expressed through written language, and what role they have in shaping social interactions. New research from U-M and Nokia Bell Labs has used crowdsourcing and a tech tool to detect how these characteristics are expressed… Read More »
Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular way to advance a technology idea or to spin it off for new uses, but U-M research shows when faced with extreme interest, team leaders must often rely on traditional organizational management structure to get the work done. When a collaborative crowdsourced project is thrust into the limelight, the impact—or shock—of so… Read More »
A COVID-era redesign of a long-running computer science undergraduate course will put up to 120 U-M computer science and engineering students to work designing software to tackle problems related to the crisis during the 2020 spring/summer semester. Computer science and engineering lecturer David Chesney has run the class for years as an in-person offering called “Software for Accessibility.”… Read More »
In light of the coronavirus outbreak, U-M summer student orientation, which is mandatory for all first-year and transfer students, is moving online. The switch to online orientation will affect the ability of students to visit campus and meet other students. Ann Hower, director of the Office of New Student Programs, said the office is preparing intensively to provide an excellent experience… Read More »
Amid a growing coronavirus crisis, experts in all fields have begun compiling massive datasets to track the impact of the contagion. To make constructing these datasets as accurate and timely as possible, Michael Cafarella, professor of computer science and engineering, is leading an NSF-funded project that will build high-quality auxiliary datasets to enable automatic quality checking and fraud… Read More »
The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world around us and is affecting our health, our economy, our social interactions, and so much more. Faculty and students affiliated with the AI Lab in Computer Science and Engineering have partnered with clinicians and experts from other disciplines to bring their expertise to assist with the outbreak and to help find… Read More »
The Digital Public Library of America displays over 36 million records. While a large share come from ‘Content Hubs’ like the Smithsonian or HathiTrust, there are still millions of records ingested from a wide range of smaller institutions across America. “The technologies we use to transform and validate XML records, like XSLT, are well-established and highly reliable, but software for… Read More »
A new app called kare is an anonymous wellness support platform recently launched by U-M students for college students. According to business junior Bennett Hilkert, chief executive officer and a co-founder of kare, the apps tagline (“because sometimes we don’t feel our best”) outlines the purpose of the company: to help connect students via an anonymous peer-to-peer support… Read More »
With advanced computer vision models and live public street cam video, a U-M startup is tracking social distancing behaviors in real time at some of the most visited places in the world. Voxel51’s new tool uses the company’s existing platform and underlying custom AI to continuously track vehicle, cyclist, and pedestrian traffic at seven locations around the world, and… Read More »
As universities around the country transitioned to online instruction, faculty and staff members had to quickly change how they teach and work. The shift has been filled with challenges, but also new opportunities. The University Record recently featured stories about how four faculty made the quick transition to remote teaching: Ginger Shultz’s chemistry students would no longer have… Read More »
Two U-M computer science and engineering students have distinguished themselves with their work on ways to speed up and improve data center efficiency. Computer science undergraduate Nathan Brown competed in the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Student Research Competition and took first place among undergraduates. His project provides a means to speed up software applications by reading future… Read More »
A federal court has cleared the way for academic researchers, computer scientists, and journalists to continue work that investigates online company practices for racial, gender or other discrimination. The ruling means that those who research online companies no longer have to fear prosecution for the work they do to hold tech companies accountable for their practices, said Christian Sandvig, professor… Read More »
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Enriching Scholarship has been cancelled for this year. However, many workshops will still be offered remotely throughout the coming months. You can view all upcoming workshops on the TeachTech website, including a full slate of upcoming sessions on remote teaching. In addition to in-person sessions, you may also be interested in the IT4U Webinars offered by ITS.… Read More »
Michigan Online contains more than 180 learning experiences and is available free to U-M students, faculty, staff, and alumni. For students, it is a place to take courses, participate in Teach-Outs, and earn degrees all from the comfort of their own homes. Especially during these difficult times, it is a great way for anyone to broaden their knowledge, complement… Read More »
A 2017 study reported that a code author’s gender had a significant impact on the code reviewer’s approval or rejection rate. In fact, women’s contributions were rejected more often when their gender was identifiable to the reviewer, and accepted more often when their work was anonymous. An interdisciplinary team of U-M researchers will test these observations and identify… Read More »