Author Archives: News Staff
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.
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.
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 »
Google November Monthly Update New Google Sites Goes Live on 11/21 IT4U68: Inbox by Gmail U-M Google October Updates See all updates
A study published this month in the journal Health Affairs found problems with many smartphone health apps. Most concerning was what happened (or didn’t happen) with information that should have drawn warnings from the app—like selecting “yes” when the app asked if the user was feeling suicidal, or entering extremely abnormal levels for blood sugar levels. Only 28… Read More »
The Higher Education Data Warehouse (HEDW) selected Information Quest (IQ) to host their April 2019 Conference in Ann Arbor. “This is a huge honor and will allow us to showcase the University of Michigan and our work here in IQ,” said Shelly Turner, application developer lead for IQ who will also serve on the HEDW board from 2017… Read More »
Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are some of today’s most well-known virtual assistants. All are female, and all elicit an image of an assistant who is not just a woman, but a woman people can boss around, flirt with, and act inappropriately toward. Compound that with portrayals in the media and it all starts to feel… Read More »
A new Michigan IT Community of Practice is taking shape around augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems. Areas of interest include the use of these systems for visualization, teaching, content development, and performance. Meetings will begin in January (specific date TBA). Join the MCommunity group, AR and VR CoP, and the new Google+ community for more… Read More »
U-M and Unizin, a consortium of leading research institutions, recently launched a beta pilot of a new learning dashboard tool. Snapshot lets faculty view student engagement trends, monitor outcomes, and identify students at risk of failure. Students can view their own dashboard and compare it with their peers. John Johnston (ITS Teaching & Learning) partnered with Meg Bakewell… Read More »
The New Year will bring more than just snow and fitness resolutions. In the first part of 2017, you can expect improvements to how the Michigan Newsletter is published and distributed. Take our reader survey to weigh in. Your feedback will inform the direction of Michigan IT news to better serve the community. We’ve already made some changes:… Read More »
Carrie Shumaker, formerly ITS assistant director for human capital management and student administration systems, accepted a position as the interim director of information technology, strategy, and operations at UM-Dearborn. Effective December 1, Shumaker will lead all Dearborn IT efforts, including applications, network, storage, architecture, and cybersecurity.
Want to learn more about managing digital signs? The Digital Signage Support page offers step-by-step procedures and a 30-minute eLearning course, DSWE101 Design a Simple Sign. The course introduces ITS digital signage software and demonstrates how the different pieces of a sign come together.
The networked electronics found in modern vehicles provide many useful and cool benefits, such as fuel savings, parking assist, and collision avoidance. Most of these features involve passing data among vehicle systems and human drivers. This connectivity also offers hackers new potential exploits. According to research presented last month by U-M researchers Kyong-Tak Cho and Kang Shin at… Read More »
In the tech world, one of the biggest questions of the 21st century is: How small can we make transistors? Today’s transistors, at about 70 silicon atoms wide, are getting very close to the limits of current technology. Arnab Hazari, doctoral student in electrical engineering, explains how “photonic chips” that use light, made up of photons, could solve… Read More »
Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile leaders of the so-called alternative right last month, raising new questions about the largely online movement’s potential for influencing national debate. While the suspensions could damage the movement by limiting its ability to spread its ideology, others believe it could make the alt-right stronger by feeding into its narrative of liberal… Read More »
U-M Box November Updates Box Edit Try Out the New Box Interface Box at U-M Quarterly Stats See all updates
Experts say Facebook’s recent move to ban phony news sites from its advertising network will do little to stop the spread of such articles on its platform. That’s because fake news sites rely heavily on Facebook to steer traffic to their stories to generate ad revenue through other ad services, like Google AdSense. Gautam Hans, a clinical fellow… Read More »
An interview exploring the technology underlying home device security and the Internet of Things (IoT) was recently broadcasted by CBC Radio. Atul Prakash, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, spoke about why many IoT devices are vulnerable. “The technology is relatively new,” said Prakash. “Hardware is probably a little bit ahead of the software at this point,… Read More »