Author Archives: News Staff
Do you write code for research or class? Do you sometimes get stuck? Are you just starting to learn how to code? Hosted by members of the U-M community, CoderSpaces are there for you to meet other coders and learn from your coder peers. Participation is open to anyone interested in writing code for computational social science, data… Read More »
Society’s ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging computing technologies has led many in the field to talk about the need for ethics, standards, and policies to help guide their use. Among the concerns over the increasing use of AI and data-based algorithms are gender and racial stereotyping, and an overall lack of accountability and digital justice.… Read More »
The U-M Library has more than 300 separate digital collections that contain over one million items. A significant portion are available without restriction to anyone to discover and engage with. While there has long been a way that users can search across these text and image collections, or within a particular collection, until recently this was not available through the… Read More »
The Information Assurance: Michigan Medicine (IA) team was awarded a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Innovation Mini-Grant from the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion. With the goal of spreading awareness of the field of cybersecurity and available job opportunities, the IA team developed a two-hour interactive introduction to the field of information assurance. Participants learned about the role… Read More »
As modes for teaching and learning continue to evolve—in part due to the influence of technology—the demand for skilled learning experience designers has grown. A new collaboration at U-M seeks to address that need. The Center for Academic Innovation and School of Education have partnered to offer graduate students a Learning Experience Design Certificate Program (LXD). Combining School… Read More »
Are you (or one of your colleagues) working on an instructional, research, or outreach project that would benefit from two intense days of collaboration with U-M Library specialists? Are you available to join us on May 7-8, 2020? If your answer is yes and yes, we invite you to apply to U-M Library’s 2020 Scholar Sprints. Scholar Sprints offer… Read More »
Svetla Sytch, the recently named assistant director of privacy and IT policy for U-M, brings a unique perspective on privacy and its role in higher education. “When I was growing up in communist Bulgaria, privacy was not a thing. Come to think of it, we did not even have a word for it,” she wrote recently in an… Read More »
In January, the School of Education launched a new online certificate for working teachers and administrators across the globe. The Advanced Education Technology Certificate Program (AETP) is a fully web-based program developed specifically for P–12 educators who are working in a school. It is designed to support individual teachers and administrators, or entire districts, interested in professional development… Read More »
Online ratings can help with making decisions on everything from hotels to hair stylists. But online ratings of physicians? A new poll by the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation suggests they don’t yet hold as much sway with the Americans who use the most health care: people over age 50. In all, 43 percent of people between… Read More »
The first ever Extended Reality (XR) at Michigan Summit will take place on Tuesday, April 14 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The event will welcome speakers from all over the country to share their knowledge and insight around XR. Register for the event. The XR at Michigan Summit is organized by the U-M Center For Academic Innovation and expects to feature… Read More »
Many voters across the country will cast ballots this year on machines called ballot-marking devices (BMDs), which combine the convenience of touchscreen technology with an auditable paper trail. However, the system relies on voters to identify errors. That could be a problem according to a U-M report published in early January. According to the study, only 6.6% of… Read More »
Precision Health (PH) at U-M takes a multidisciplinary approach to prevention, implementation, and community health and is a key HITS collaborator. PH studies are tracked within LabVantage, a lab information management system that supports study protocols and designs, follows a chain of custody process for samples, and creates an audit trail. PH studies comprise 70,000 patients. Using data… Read More »
Beginning in 2016, and continuing with a major effort in 2018, the Office of Continuing Medical Education and Lifelong Learning (OCME&LL) worked with several groups within HITS to retire and replace the old system for tracking continuing medical education (CME). Known as eCat or Orange Card, the old system was replaced with a more streamlined, electronic service called… Read More »
Online learning plays a critical role for today’s students by offering greater flexibility to accommodate work schedules and, in many cases, creating more affordable pathways to credentials. However, concerns over quality and potential bad actors have inspired repeated attempts to regulate distance education in a manner that appropriately balances innovation with quality assurance and consumer protections. In a… Read More »
The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery & Engineering and the Center for Academic Innovation have partnered to launch a massive open online course (MOOC) titled “Problem Solving using Computational Thinking.” The course uses real-world examples to focus on the larger systematic thinking needed to conceptualize a problem with the intent of eventually using computational tools to solve it. The course… Read More »
Gamut, a new suite of online learning tools from Academic Innovation are available for immediate use by any U-M faculty or instructional staff. Each tool is a standalone web application that uses a technology called the Learning Tools Interoperability protocol, which allows them to easily integrate into any course on Canvas, Coursera, edX, or FutureLearn. So far, the… Read More »
Rada Mihalcea, professor of computer science and engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This title is the organization’s most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology. Mihalcea is recognized for her outstanding research on natural language and multi-modal interaction… Read More »
The Strategic Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) is committed to creating a culture of collaboration for innovation and progress. Since its renaming and the adoption of a new charter last June, the committee has been busy! STAC has met with unit IT leadership and identified six top unit priorities: procurement services research computing and services storage options SPG 601.27… Read More »
While adaptive sports provide opportunities for children with mobility disabilities to participate in athletic events, these games are not designed for competitive play between kids with disabilities and those without. iGYM, an augmented reality game system created by a team of U-M researchers, is looking to change that. The current implementation of the system resembles soccer — or… Read More »
Packy, a furry, fun mascot is the symbol of the BackPac app created by U-M students to encourage others, particularly their peers, to spend some time volunteering in the community—especially during the holidays when the needs are great. “The number of volunteers has significantly gone down in the last decade,” said Gaurav Dhir, co-founder of BackPac and a… Read More »