Category Archives: Campus News

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Building better coronavirus databases with automatic quality checks

By | April 20, 2020

Amid a growing coronavirus crisis, experts in all fields have begun compiling massive datasets to track the impact of the contagion. To make constructing these datasets as accurate and timely as possible, Michael Cafarella, professor of computer science and engineering, is leading an NSF-funded project that will build high-quality auxiliary datasets to enable automatic quality checking and fraud… Read More »

Computer scientists employ AI to help address COVID-19 challenges

By | April 16, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world around us and is affecting our health, our economy, our social interactions, and so much more. Faculty and students affiliated with the AI Lab in Computer Science and Engineering have partnered with clinicians and experts from other disciplines to bring their expertise to assist with the outbreak and to help find… Read More »

Combine Metadata Harvester: Aggregate ALL the data!

By | April 14, 2020

The Digital Public Library of America displays over 36 million records. While a large share come from ‘Content Hubs’ like the Smithsonian or HathiTrust, there are still millions of records ingested from a wide range of smaller institutions across America. “The technologies we use to transform and validate XML records, like XSLT, are well-established and highly reliable, but software for… Read More »

App to provide anonymous support network for U-M students

By | April 10, 2020

A new app called kare is an anonymous wellness support platform recently launched by U-M students for college students. According to business junior Bennett Hilkert, chief executive officer and a co-founder of kare, the apps tagline (“because sometimes we don’t feel our best”) outlines the purpose of the company: to help connect students via an anonymous peer-to-peer support… Read More »

Live public street cams are tracking social distancing

By | April 10, 2020

With advanced computer vision models and live public street cam video, a U-M startup is tracking social distancing behaviors in real time at some of the most visited places in the world. Voxel51’s new tool uses the company’s existing platform and underlying custom AI to continuously track vehicle, cyclist, and pedestrian traffic at seven locations around the world, and… Read More »

Start your (software) engines! CAEN provides XR support to MRacing team

What do you get when you combine race cars and extended reality (XR)? If you said a modded version of “Grand Theft Auto” you’d be wrong. The correct answer is: U-M’s award-winning Michigan Electric Racing Team (and CAEN’s John Hufnagel). Hufnagel is the lead MCAD applications analyst for CAEN, the IT services department for Michigan Engineering. (MCAD is… Read More »

Virtual solutions: Four stories of challenge and opportunity

By | April 9, 2020

As universities around the country transitioned to online instruction, faculty and staff members had to quickly change how they teach and work. The shift has been filled with challenges, but also new opportunities. The University Record recently featured stories about how four faculty made the quick transition to remote teaching: Ginger Shultz’s chemistry students would no longer have… Read More »

Engineering students improve data center efficiency

By | April 8, 2020

Two U-M computer science and engineering students have distinguished themselves with their work on ways to speed up and improve data center efficiency. Computer science undergraduate Nathan Brown competed in the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Student Research Competition and took first place among undergraduates. His project provides a means to speed up software applications by reading future… Read More »

Federal Court rules in favor of UMSI professor in discrimination research case

By | April 8, 2020

A federal court has cleared the way for academic researchers, computer scientists, and journalists to continue work that investigates online company practices for racial, gender or other discrimination. The ruling means that those who research online companies no longer have to fear prosecution for the work they do to hold tech companies accountable for their practices, said Christian Sandvig, professor… Read More »

Researchers to use brain scans to understand gender bias in software development

By | April 6, 2020

A 2017 study reported that a code author’s gender had a significant impact on the code reviewer’s approval or rejection rate. In fact, women’s contributions were rejected more often when their gender was identifiable to the reviewer, and accepted more often when their work was anonymous. An interdisciplinary team of U-M researchers will test these observations and identify… Read More »

Putting hardware accelerators to work with automatic code translation

By | April 3, 2020

Most programs in use today have to be completely rewritten at a very low level to reap the benefits of hardware acceleration. This system demonstrates how to make that translation automatic. A new technique developed by researchers at U-M could enable broader adoption of post-Moore’s Law computing components through automatic code translation. The system, called AutomataSynth, allows software… Read More »

U-M Library in-copyright books now available online through HathiTrust

In-copyright books in the U-M library collection are now fully searchable and readable online via the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service. This service, which was turned on early this week for all authenticated U-M affiliates, makes fully 60% of the library’s physical book collection searchable and readable online on a temporary basis during the COVID-19 crisis. The HathiTrust website offers information about… Read More »

Using machine learning to detect disease before symptoms manifest

By | March 27, 2020

Alfred Hero, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been working on predicting health and disease of people exposed to infectious viral pathogens since early 2007. His research uses machine learning to help discover genes in whole blood that can be used to detect early signs of acute respiratory viral infection (ARVI), as well as improve the… Read More »

Big data, small footprint

By | March 27, 2020

At a time when we’re relying on the internet to an unprecedented degree in our daily lives, a team of U-M researchers led by Mosharaf Chowdhury and Harsha Madhyastha has found a way for tech companies, banks and health systems to squeeze more capacity out of our existing infrastructure. A change to the design of big-data software tool Apache Spark could enable the… Read More »

Student-centered events at Dearborn are getting a reboot online

By | March 26, 2020

As classes moved online last week and most UM-Dearborn staff started working from home, one vital part of campus life was left mostly on the sidelines in the wake of new social distancing measures: in-person university events disappeared from the calendar. Dean of Students Amy Finley says that was a particularly big blow to students and student organizations. But… Read More »

U-M awards six XR projects under new initiative

By | March 23, 2020

U-M has awarded funding to six extended reality projects under the its new XR Initiative, announced in the fall. The three-year funded initiative calls for the Center for Academic Innovation to seed new projects and experiments that integrate XR into residential and online curricula, and to create innovative public/private partnerships to develop new XR related educational technology. “The… Read More »

At home during Coronavirus pandemic? U-M offers online courses, exhibits, speakers

By | March 20, 2020

Living rooms around the world can become places to learn how to start a business for social impact or to peek inside a museum to see homemade ancient wooden toy horses from Roman Egypt. U-M is providing multiple opportunities to learn and explore online while staying at home during the coronavirus pandemic: U-M’s art and performance organizations and… Read More »

How quickly does coronavirus spread? A U-M data science fellow works to answer the question.

As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) advances around the world, a growing number of researchers are using computational models to estimate this spread. Among the first to publish on the subject is a team of Hong Kong- and China-based researchers that includes University of Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) research fellow Qianying Lin. For the past several weeks,… Read More »