Category Archives: Campus News

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Engineering undergrads prep for a modern workforce with expanded data analytics courses and support

By | November 25, 2020
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In 2018, U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) faculty set their sights on fully-preparing students for the modern workforce and advanced studies by incorporating computing and data analytics into many existing courses, creating a new advanced analytics course for seniors, and implementing a new help desk to support students. One of the main changes was to emphasize R and Python… Read More »

Young kids’ YouTube viewing dominated by consumerism, ads

By | November 24, 2020
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young boy watching YouTube on a tablet

A recent report by Michigan Medicine and non-profit Common Sense Media finds children are often consuming pervasive and inappropriate advertising, violence, and other questionable content while watching online videos. Children ages eight and under are now spending more time on YouTube than ever before, with online video viewing for the first time surpassing live television and streaming video… Read More »

2020 CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition highlights outstanding research

By | November 23, 2020
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CSE wordmark

Computer Science And Engineering held its seventeenth annual CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition on November 11, 2020. The competition recognizes the research done by PhD students at CSE and the final competition is the culmination of a process that narrows a field of entrants to a handful of finalists, each of whom gives a summary presentation on an… Read More »

Democratizing genetic data for cancer research

By | November 20, 2020
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graphic showing to people icons next to DAN strings.

By distilling information from hundreds of data sources, U-M Precision Health researchers have launched an open-access, online repository called Cancer PRSWeb that will help accelerate advancements in cancer prevention and prediction. The researchers created polygenic risk scores (PRS) for 35 cancer traits and then evaluated the scores using electronic health record data from the Michigan Genomics Initiative and the… Read More »

UM-Dearborn’s artificial intelligence center having great first year

By | November 20, 2020
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DAIR logo

U-M Dearborn founded the Dearborn Artificial Intelligence Research Center less than a year ago with a strategy of “think big, start small, and scale fast.” Organizers have already made impressive progress toward making AI one of Dearborn’s topline areas for research, education, and industry collaboration. Over the past year, several DAIR Center projects have won funding and the… Read More »

Dearborn prof’s wearable technology improves at-home physical therapy

By | November 19, 2020
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African American man doing exercise with a dumbell

Samir Rawashdeh, UM-Dearborn assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a colleague have developed RehabBuddy, a physical therapy system that employs a wearable sensor that records a “map” of the correct movement of exercises. The RehabBuddy system starts with an in-person visit to a physical therapist. The patient wears a small sensor that records a “map” of… Read More »

Epic MegaGrant will support development of XR projects

By | November 18, 2020
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U-M’s Extended Reality (XR) Initiative, a part of the Center for Academic Innovation, received $120,000 from an Epic Games MegaGrant. CAI will use the funds to hire 20-30 student fellows over the next two years and educate them in different tools and processes like Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by the company Epic Games. “While the university has… Read More »

New tool automates popular system security technique

By | November 18, 2020
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illustration of sandbox with shovel over computer code background

Working with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Xinyu Wang, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, co-authored an award-winning paper that demonstrates how to automatically build sandboxing policies to keep a computer system safe. Sandboxing is a software management strategy that isolates applications from critical system resources and other programs. One common sandbox approach… Read More »

‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

By | November 17, 2020
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screenshot of europe map with Poland highlighted

Navigate this 3D world map by clicking, holding and dragging the mouse cursor. See how censorship levels range around the globe. The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A U-M team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking system launched… Read More »

First digital single-chip millimeter-wave beamformer will exploit 5G capabilities

By | November 17, 2020
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The first fully-integrated single-chip digital millimeter-wave (MMW) beamformer, created by electrical and computer engineers at U-M, opens up new possibilities in high-frequency 5G communications. The technology could be used to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communication, autonomous driving, satellite internet, and national defense, to name a few. Beamforming allows a device that is transmitting signals to point them in a particular… Read More »

Jason Flinn honored with 2020 Mark Weiser Award

By | November 16, 2020
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Jason Flinn

Jason Flinn, professor of computer science and engineering, has been recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) with the 2020 Mark Weiser Award, a preeminent honor in the field of operating systems. The award recognizes a career of contributions “that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark… Read More »

Ad-free, censorship-free social sites MeWe, Parler see surge in interest postelection

By | November 12, 2020
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Close-up Photography of Smartphone Icons

Since the Nov. 3 election, people—particularly President Trump supporters—have been flocking to social media platforms Parler and MeWe, which promise ad-free or uncensored experiences. MeWe’s promise is “Your private life is not 4Sale: No ads. No Spyware. No BS.” Parler calls itself “the world’s town square,” inviting participants to “speak freely and express yourself openly.” Libby Hemphill, associate… Read More »

Voting counts: How U-M grad students answered the question ‘Did you get my ballot?’

By | October 30, 2020
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This election year in Michigan has seen a huge increase in absentee ballot requests. As a result, clerk’s offices are spending a lot of time answering phone calls from voters checking on the status of their ballot. School of Information graduate students Lauren Trimble, Joshua Tooker, and Michael Payne worked this summer on a pilot project to streamline… Read More »

Google case study features U-M student learning tool

By | October 29, 2020
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MyLA logo

Google recently featured a case study of U-M’s My Learning Analytics (MyLA) tool as part of its G Suite for Education Higher Ed support materials. Working with Google and Unizin, ITS developed My Learning Analytics (MyLA), a data analytics tool that visualizes course data and activities so students can monitor their own learning behaviors. MyLA uses the Unizin Common Data Model… Read More »

Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits awarded, credits still available

By | October 28, 2020
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The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and Information and Technology Services (ITS) recently partnered with Microsoft Azure to offer cloud computing credits to U-M faculty members for both research and teaching projects.   Congratulations to the following faculty members who received awards for their projects.  Emily Mower Provost, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of… Read More »

Tracking monarch butterfly migration with the world’s smallest computer

By | October 27, 2020
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In a project funded by National Geographic, electrical and computer engineering researchers are teaming up with the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology to advance our understanding of monarch butterfly migration with the most ambitious iteration of the Michigan Micro Mote yet. The M3, created by David Blaauw, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and several other… Read More »

Pearson to lead UM-Flint’s new College of Innovation & Technology

By | October 26, 2020
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Christopher Pearson

A UM-Flint physics professor will take the helm of the new College of Innovation & Technology that is being established on the Flint campus. Christopher A. Pearson was approved as the inaugural dean of the college at the Oct. 22 Board of Regents meeting. Pearson begins his duties Nov. 1. He currently is the associate dean of the College… Read More »

CISO Tuesdays features U-M’s Sol Bermann

By | October 22, 2020
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CISO Tuesdays is a Medium blog, crowdsourced from higher education, that provides a snapshot of a “typical” day for a chief information security officer. Recently, U-M’s own CISO, Sol Bermann, shared a post describing how the pandemic has less changed things in regard to information security and higher ed, but rather simply “made them more.” Entitled My days… Read More »