Normally, we’d remind you about conserving energy and securing your desk and office before you leave campus for Winter Break. However, because many if not most of us are already working from home, we’re changing it up a bit this year. (But if you’re still in the office, check out last year’s article for details on what to… Read More »
Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, was awarded with the Michigan CIO of the Year ORBIE Award for the nonprofit/public sector by the Michigan CIO Leadership Association (MichiganCIO). The ORBIE honors chief information officers who have demonstrated excellence in technology leadership. “The MichiganCIO ORBIE winners demonstrate the value great leadership creates. Especially in… Read More »
As we close out 2020, Information and Technology Services would like to thank our Michigan IT colleagues, faculty, staff, and students for their flexibility and willingness to adapt to so many changes this year. Happy holidays and best wishes for the winter term! Visit the ITS website for IT resources to make 2021 a successful new year.
LSA Technology Services is pleased to announce that Amy Peters has been named our new director of research computing and infrastructure services, and joins the LSA Technology Services leadership team effective Monday, December 7. Peters was selected for the position from a competitive and diverse candidate pool after a comprehensive search that began in February 2020, but was… Read More »
Just five years ago, most websites relied on unencrypted HTTP, the aging and inherently insecure protocol that provides no protection to sites or visitors from threats that range from surveillance through phishing and identity theft. Today, the internet is a much more secure place, with over 80% of websites protected by HTTPS secure encryption. That dramatic transformation –… Read More »
When it comes to making human resources decisions, can humans be fair? What about relying on algorithms to make decisions instead? The answer to the first question is not always, which leads some business leaders to pursue the second. Yet, it turns out decisions made by machines are perceived as even less fair than those made by humans.… Read More »
At a public event celebrating LGBTQ+ inclusion, the International Business Machines Corporation presented Lynn Conway, professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science, with a rare lifetime achievement award. The award accompanied IBM’s apology to Conway, which came 52 years after the company fired her for coming out as transgender. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Conway… Read More »
The National Security Agency recently recognized a major breakthrough in the field of side-channel attacks as the winner of the 2020 Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper competition. Daniel Genkin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, worked on the paper with collaborators from around the world. The winning paper, describing an exploit called Spectre, broke open a new… Read More »
Flint Information Technology Services recently issued its annual report for FY20. (The entire report (PDF) is available online.) The report provides updates on the organization’s eight operational areas as well as bios of ITS professional staff. Below are highlights of the report: ITS-Classroom Services: ITS-Classroom Services completed a number of upgrades across general classroom spaces. After the transition… Read More »
U-M researchers say employing a conversational assistant could be one way to narrow the gap in health disparities impacting the African American community, particularly around the current COVID-19 pandemic. Lionel Robert, associate professor at the School of Information and senior author of a study in the journal Digital Government: Research & Practice, says a technological solution could keep… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
A team of undergraduate students is on the path to releasing a commercial video game with Yolked – a game that began life as their final project in EECS 494, Introduction to Video Game Development. This is the first time that a team from the class has signed a funded publishing deal to deliver a polished up version of their… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »