Author Archives: News Staff
Thursday, March 2, 8 a.m.–5 p.m. & Friday, March 3, 8 a.m.–4 p.m.; Ross School of Business. Hacks with Friends is a spirited, two-day hacking event where you can break out of your normal routine and have some fun. Form a team, build a project (a.k.a. “hack”) from beginning to end, and show it off in a fun, friendly… Read More »
Wednesday, January 25, 9–9:45 a.m.; online. Google Sites has a new look and feel. Monica Hickson (ITS) shows how to create pages, add new stylish themes, drag and drop content, and collaborate in real time. Level: Intermediate. Register in My LINC. If you missed last month’s IT4U, Collaborate with Box & Google Shared Accounts, here’s the 41-minute YouTube… Read More »
Monday, January 16; 10 a.m., Hill Auditorium. The theme for this year’s annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium keynote lecture is “The Sounds of Change.” The lecture will be streaming online at mlksymposium.umich.edu. A special thank you to the ITS Infrastructure team who will create a direct network connection between the Ann Arbor campus and the U-M Detroit Center. Their efforts… Read More »
Computer science and engineering students at U-M partnered with visually impaired high school student India West to develop technologies that may help other blind and visually impaired people navigate the world around them. David Chesney, a lecturer in electrical engineering and computer science, leads the effort, which is featured in this video. Read more about the project.
Melissa Levine, the lead copyright officer at the U-M Library and ex officio member of the library’s open access committee, co-authored an article advocating open access publishing as a way to speed up scientific discoveries and advances in technology. “If published research and data were freely accessible and reusable by researchers of diverse interests, urgently needed solutions could be… Read More »
A group of researchers including Josh Ackerman, an assistant professor of psychology at U-M, believe you might be “accidentally” breaking your phone, on purpose, to justify getting a new one. It’s a phenomenon called the “upgrade effect” and according to the study, that’s exactly what we’re doing.The study found that even when people think they aren’t being careless or deliberate… Read More »
Facebook, with 1.79 billion monthly active users, has emerged as the main engine for “fake news.” Researchers say they’d like to help Facebook get to grips with its problem. But if you want to work with Facebook’s data, you usually have to become a contractor, work at its campus in Menlo Park, and agree to the company’s terms on what… Read More »
Students and faculty from the School of Education are working with students at Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor to help them become good digital citizens, and so they can become ambassadors for others in their school. Watch the video below to learn how the program hopes to foster civility and respect online.
“Fake” news is not limited to politics or celebrity gossip. A study by Ceren Budak, an assistant professor at the School of Information, shows that the most popular health stories on social media may also be the least accurate. For example, four out of five popular posts on Facebook about Zika contained accurate information, but the ones containing… Read More »
A team of researchers on the Ann Arbor and Flint campuses have developed a new Android app to help Flint residents during the ongoing water crisis. MyWater-Flint is an interactive guide that lets people pinpoint homes with a greater risk for lead, and also shows where lead has been found in city water. Users can see where pipes… Read More »
As part of this year’s Academic Innovation Initiative, the Office of Academic Innovation has challenged the U-M community to contribute more than 2,017 ideas about how we should transform education at Michigan. Visit the Ideas2017 Challenge website and enter a tweet-sized idea (or bigger). While you’re there, browse through ideas that have been submitted.
When Canvas API calls began to bog down Student Explorer—an application that serves as an early warning system for academic advisors—Information and Technology Services (ITS) and the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) worked with Unizin to reduce data processing time by half with the Unizin Data Warehouse. Read the case study (PDF) to learn about their solution to provide reliable data… Read More »
Kelli Trosvig, U-M’s new vice president for IT and chief information officer (VPIT-CIO) as of November 14, has named Sol Bermann as the university’s interim chief information security officer (CISO). Bermann served as interim CISO prior to Don Welch’s arrival and continues to serve as U-M’s privacy officer.
After recent attacks threw the rampant insecurities of internet-connected cameras, video recorders, and other gadgets into sharp relief, Washington lawmakers and officials are urging tech firms to do more to secure the Internet of Things. At a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing last month, lawmakers said the attacks raised national security concerns and questions about the need… Read More »
Kudos to Ben Meekhof (ARC-TS), and Dan Kirkland and Dan Eklund (ITS) for their support of U-M faculty and staff presenting at SC16, a supercomputing conference hosted in Salt Lake City, November 13–17. The team established a dedicated 100G path from U-M to the SC16 conference center as well as high-speed paths from Indiana University, Michigan State University, and… Read More »
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced the Commons Credit Pilot, which provides biomedical researchers support for access to cloud-based computing resources as part of the its Commons program. Researchers interested in requesting resources from the program can get support for their submissions from Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS). NOTE: Researchers must hold an NIH… Read More »
A recent article published in Communications of the ACM examines the chronology of medical device security. The paper is the result of an interdisciplinary project, known as Trustworthy Health and Wellness, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Peter Honeyman, U-M research professor of computer science and engineering, collaborated on the article. Learn more.
Archaeologists in northern Michigan have used pulses of light shot from airplanes to double their discoveries. This remote sensing technology is called light detection and ranging, or lidar. Lidar sends out a pulse of light that returns a measure of distance from the object it strikes. It can greatly improve the efficiency of archaeological searches particularly when scanning… Read More »
Sherif El-Tawil, professor and associate chair of civil and environmental engineering, was quoted in an article published by U.S. News about the effects of virtual reality technology in engineering education. Professor El-Tawil’s MIDEN virtual reality cave gives Michigan Engineers unprecedented insight into the way structures come together, buckle, and collapse.
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