Category Archives: Campus News

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LSA Technology Services Jaron Fox wins HDI Motown’s Best Service and Support Analyst

By | May 26, 2020
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Jaron Fox

The Help Desk Institute (HDI) is an organization designed to support IT-focused service centers on industry standards, best practices, and service-oriented education. This award recognizes tier 1 support staff on: being well-rounded in technical aptitude, team orientation, customer service skills, and people skills having a positive attitude and enthusiasm being committed to sharing their knowledge and problem-solving techniques… Read More »

Research on human biases in AI learning earns best student paper award

By | May 26, 2020
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The project demonstrated that a certain bias in humans who train intelligent agents significantly reduced the effectiveness of the training. A team of researchers working to more effectively train autonomous agents earned the Pragnesh Jay Modi – Best Student Paper at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2020). Led by second-year Ph.D. student Divya… Read More »

Not on stage, but instead on screens, U-M medical students graduate virtually

By | May 26, 2020
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It is a rite of passage into their profession, but for 173 U-M medical students, this year’s commencement ceremony was different due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of convening at Hill Auditorium to receive their diplomas and officially become doctors, members of the graduating Class of 2020 gathered with loved ones around their mobile phones, monitors, laptops and… Read More »

Chemical Engineering graduate recruitment goes virtual

By | May 26, 2020
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Participants in this year’s prospective graduate student recruitment visit experienced Michigan Chemical Engineering from an entirely new vantage point–online. The 2020 recruitment team developed two parallel plans as they monitored the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak in Michigan and beyond. One version of the recruitment visit closely resembled its predecessors, while the other repackaged the traditional in-person event… Read More »

Special COVID-19 Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) grants

By | May 18, 2020
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MIDAS logo

Last week, the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) announced the awardees of its COVID-19 data science grants. Seven interdisciplinary teams, chosen from 49 submissions, received funding for COVID-19 research. With data science methods at the core, these teams combat the pandemic in varied and creative ways, including better clinical decisions for in-patients, strategies to improve testing, data-driven guidance… Read More »

Faster than COVID-19: computer model predicts disease’s next move

By | May 15, 2020
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hands holding tables with health info & graphs

M-CURES, a computational model now in development, could help hospitals anticipate fast-changing patient needs while keeping care providers safe. Developed by a team of researchers at the College of Engineering, Precision Health, and Michigan Medicine, the model uses a machine learning algorithm to crunch more than 200 health and demographic variables of individual COVID-19 patients. The model then… Read More »

Watch: How predictive modeling could help us reopen more safely

By | May 14, 2020
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elderly woman in doorway reaches out for a food delivery

Increasingly specific social distancing questions are weighing on states and municipalities as they inch toward relaxing COVID-19 restrictions. Now, a team of computer science and medical researchers based at U-M is working on a tool that could provide more precise answers. The team is mashing up census data, virus transmission rates, and decades of social science research to… Read More »

New wearable health tech research center announced

By | May 7, 2020
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data synchronization of health book between smartwatch and smartphone in male hands

As heart disease and stroke remain the leading causes of death worldwide, a new U-M research initiative aims to investigate how mobile health (mHealth) technology, such as smartwatches and smartphones, can be used to study and improve health behaviors among hypertensive populations. “Mobile technology has changed nearly all aspects of our lives. There is great hope that mHealth… Read More »

Watch: Digital Burnout: What Can We Do?

By | May 7, 2020
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illustration of woman climbing into a computer screen to join colleagues meeting in a conference room

Kelly Murdoch-Kitt, assistant professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design, is a user experience designer and educator focused on people, systems and interpersonal interactions. In a recent interview published on the U-M Arts & Culture site, she discusses tactics for remote learning and working, many of which are taken from a book that she co-authored, which… Read More »

U-M celebrates Class of 2020 with day of online tributes, social media

By | May 5, 2020
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GO DISCOVER. GO ACHIEVE. GO SERVE. GO BLUE.

U-M leaders, alumni, notables join in pandemic-altered virtual party Congratulatory video messages and other virtual activities replaced traditional commencement ceremonies as the University of Michigan community celebrated the Class of 2020 online amid the coronavirus pandemic.  President Mark Schlissel, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, university deans, notable alumni and many others were part of a daylong online… Read More »

ITS moves quickly to take campus into new normal

By | May 1, 2020
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When President Mark Schlissel announced last month that the balance of the winter semester would be conducted in alternate, virtual forms as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, all university units were quick to respond. Information and Technology Services had been actively preparing for such a situation for almost a month, in partnership with university leadership and IT leaders… Read More »

Virtual care at Michigan Medicine explodes amid COVID-19 pandemic

By | April 30, 2020
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On March 9, Michigan Medicine treated its first COVID-19 patient, one of two in the state, prompting Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to mandate that non-essential workers “Stay Home and Stay Safe.” To Michigan Medicine ambulatory care clinics, this meant deferring all in-person, non-critical appointments and elective surgeries, creating a backlog of appointments that pushed virtual care to the forefront.… Read More »

K-12 online learning platform from U-M sees dramatic rise in use

By | April 29, 2020
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Making k-12 digital, Cu of child's hand drawing on tablet.

The Collabrify Roadmap Platform, a set of free, customizable digital learning tools developed by the Center for Digital Curricula at the College of Engineering, provides K-12 teachers with scheduling templates that can be customized to include all the activities that would normally take place in their classrooms. Created last summer as a supplemental tool to make educational resources… Read More »

Digitizing and transforming mobility systems

By | April 28, 2020
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Detroit cityscape

In June 2018, the World Economic Forum chose the Detroit region to pilot the concepts behind the integration of disparate mobility modes. MIDAS affiliated faculty, Danai Koutra and Aditi Misra, and fellow, Arya Farahi, made significant contributions to the forum’s recent publication “Digitizing and Transforming Mobility Systems: Lessons from the Detroit Region.” Beyond all else, the pilot demonstrated… Read More »

Why we adopt then abandon online safety practices

By | April 28, 2020
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Creative binary code and digital padlock background. Programming and password concept.

To find out why people adopt and then sometimes abandon online safety measures, researchers from the School of Information surveyed more than 900 people about their use of 30 commonly recommended practices to guard against security, privacy, and identity theft risks. The team found that security practices like avoiding clicking on unknown links or emails were much more… Read More »

Probing tech’s soft underbelly

By | April 27, 2020
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Portrait of Dr. Kevin Fu.

On any given day in Kevin Fu’s laboratory at the College of Engineering research investigators might use an antenna to fool the lab’s sensor into giving a false temperature readings or a laser light beam to inject false voice commands in a voice-controlled assistant from a distance of 300 feet. Unlike many cybersecurity troubleshooters, Fu is not looking… Read More »

U-M researchers train tech tool to find relationship clues from written conversations

By | April 27, 2020
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Mental concept with thinking process, relationships

Social scientists have identified 10 dimensions to describe the nature of human relationships but little research has focused on how these concepts are expressed through written language, and what role they have in shaping social interactions. New research from U-M and Nokia Bell Labs has used crowdsourcing and a tech tool to detect how these characteristics are expressed… Read More »

Extreme interest in crowdsourced projects requires more traditional management

By | April 24, 2020
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Businessman with idea on laptop rasing money via internet to support project.

Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular way to advance a technology idea or to spin it off for new uses, but U-M research shows when faced with extreme interest, team leaders must often rely on traditional organizational management structure to get the work done. When a collaborative crowdsourced project is thrust into the limelight, the impact—or shock—of so… Read More »