Author Archives: News Staff
Recently, BBC Future Now launched a series about the grand challenges we face in the 21st Century. Many on their panel of experts named the breakdown of trusted sources of information as one of the most pressing problems today. Among them was Paul Resnick, professor of information at U-M. Working out who to trust and what to believe has always been… Read More »
When it comes to coming up with dystopian visions of the future, researchers in artificial intelligence can match even the best science fiction writers. Just ask U-M computer science professor Michael Wellman, who dreamed up a stock-market manipulation scenario for a recent AI doomsday workshop which took place at Arizona State University with funding from Tesla Inc. co-founder Elon Musk… Read More »
Nue Lee, a PhD student in Higher Education at U-M, details a comprehensive, three-layered back-up storage approach she uses to make sure her academic work is protected. “No one likes to talk about it, because it may be admitting that you don’t do it,” writes Lee, “but as graduate students, we must have a dedicated backup system.” Lee recommends grad students… Read More »
Around 2010, the meme began to take off as a pervasive mode of digital communication and soon became a source of merchandising and commercialization. Some of it even benefited the meme creators. But however egalitarian the internet was supposed to be, creatives’ ability to profit off their viral content seems to depend on their race. André Brock, who teaches race,… Read More »
From World War I through the 1940s, the Black Bottom neighborhood was the heart and soul of Detroit’s African-American community. Then, in the early 1950s, the area was bulldozed in the name of “slum clearance” and eventually replaced with the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park. Emily Kutil, a Detroit architect with a master’s degree in architecture from U-M, hopes to help… Read More »
Waze, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app owned by Google is joining the SmartDeviceLink Consortium and working with automakers and developers on open source protocols for connecting smart phones to car dashboard screens. This gives Waze—and therefore Google—a lot more data about you, your habits, and your car. This kind of info collection might worry some users. But Erik Gordon, who studies… Read More »
Thursday, March 16; 9-9:45 am. Online. My LINC offers a wealth of resources–from eLearning courses to step-by-step procedures. Jeanne Mackey (ITS) offers tips for streamlining navigation and searches and avoiding typical My LINC “gotcha’s.” Register.
Friday, March 24; 1–3 pm; LSA-ISS Media Center, 2001 Modern Languages Building. Do you want to find new ways to engage students but don’t have a lot of time to search? LSA’s Instructional Support Services-Learning Technologies & Consulting Group (ISS-LTC) is excited to show you six innovative ideas in less than two hours. Each session will last 15 minutes and run several times throughout… Read More »
The film Hidden Figures has taken not only the box office by storm, but the education world as well. Studies show that female and male students actually perform equally well in mathematics and science on standardized tests, but larger gaps exist between students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds or family income. Research by U-M professor emerita Jacquelynne S. Eccles points… Read More »
Wednesday, March 22; 5:30–6:30 pm; Michigan League, Henderson Room. Join Knight-Wallace Fellows Bastian Obermayer and Laurent Richard as they discuss their work in investigating and reporting on the Panama Papers and Luxembourg Leaks. This discussion will focus on the privacy and IT security challenges in engaging in this high-profile, international investigatory journalism. Admission is free. Light refreshments included. The… Read More »
UPDATE 3/2/2017: The M-Pathways PeopleTools 8.55 Upgrade for HRMS was canceled due to issues encountered during final testing. A new date for the upgrade will be announced soon. ITS is upgrading the PeopleTools technology behind M-Pathways to version 8.55. This upgrade will bring a new look and feel to navigation within M-Pathways. This change will impact everyone who… Read More »
Most of the advances in artificial intelligence have been focused on solving specific data-intensive tasks like playing chess or diagnosing tumors. However, the kind of general artificial intelligence that would create systems with human capabilities like understanding language and adapting to changing conditions are still a long way off. John Laird, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, says the strategies that… Read More »
A study by researchers from the U-M Medical School and Harvard University indicates the use of advanced machine learning for diagnosing brain tumors cuts the time needed for diagnosing tissue by 90 percent while maintaining considerable accuracy. Normally, diagnosing a brain tumor takes about 30 to 40 minutes, during which doctors would need to leave the operating room to put the… Read More »
J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and engineering, received a lot of media attention in the days after the 2016 presidential election for voicing concerns about the integrity of electronic voting systems in the U.S. In this extensive interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Halderman, director of U-M’s Center for Computer Security and Society, contends that the initial reports… Read More »
Consumers increasingly turn to commercial physician-rating websites, similar to those for restaurants and hotels, when searching for a new doctor, but the sites rarely have information that actually helps patients. “Consumers should still be careful about what they view on these sites,” says David Hanauer, an associate professor at the Medical School and the School of Information. A new study finds that most doctors… Read More »
Ann Arbor-based Clinc Inc., an artificial-intelligence startup co-founded by U-M research professors Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang announced earlier this week that it has raised a funding round of $6.3 million. That follows a seed-stage round six months ago of $1.2 million for the company, which was founded in 2015. The investment followed a well-received appearance by Clinc at the Consumers Electronic… Read More »
Typically, elected officials delegate social media posts to staffers, but that is changing. (President Donald Trump being the most famous example.) Michigan also has a few political social media stars, like Lt. Gov. Brian Calley and retired Rep. John Dingell, who manage their own accounts. Josh Pasek, assistant professor of communications studies, is not sure the trend bodes well for… Read More »
Eytan Adar, a professor of information and computer science at U-M, explains why some apps and software packages will build in artificial wait times as a way to improve the user experience. He calls it “benevolent deception,” a term he coined in a paper he published in 2013 with a pair of Microsoft researchers. For example, TurboTax employs… Read More »
Predicting color perception is easy: specific wavelengths produce specific colors that most people see in a consistent way. But predicting how a particular molecule will smell is much tougher. So a group of researchers set up a contest and invited teams of computer scientists to come up with a set of algorithms able to predict the odor of different molecules based on their… Read More »
Saturday & Sunday, March 4–5, 2017; 1–5 pm; Ann Arbor SPARK, 330 E. Liberty Street, Ann Arbor, MI. The Ann Arbor R User Group is excited to host a free two-day beginner R workshop sponsored by SPARK. R is an open-source programming software, used widely in both industry and academia, for data processing, analysis, and visualization. This workshop is geared towards… Read More »