Many voters across the country will cast ballots this year on machines called ballot-marking devices (BMDs), which combine the convenience of touchscreen technology with an auditable paper trail. However, the system relies on voters to identify errors. That could be a problem according to a U-M report published in early January. According to the study, only 6.6% of… Read More »
Online learning plays a critical role for today’s students by offering greater flexibility to accommodate work schedules and, in many cases, creating more affordable pathways to credentials. However, concerns over quality and potential bad actors have inspired repeated attempts to regulate distance education in a manner that appropriately balances innovation with quality assurance and consumer protections. In a… Read More »
Gamut, a new suite of online learning tools from Academic Innovation are available for immediate use by any U-M faculty or instructional staff. Each tool is a standalone web application that uses a technology called the Learning Tools Interoperability protocol, which allows them to easily integrate into any course on Canvas, Coursera, edX, or FutureLearn. So far, the… Read More »
Rada Mihalcea, professor of computer science and engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This title is the organization’s most prestigious member grade, recognizing the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology. Mihalcea is recognized for her outstanding research on natural language and multi-modal interaction… Read More »
The Strategic Technology Advisory Committee (STAC) is committed to creating a culture of collaboration for innovation and progress. Since its renaming and the adoption of a new charter last June, the committee has been busy! STAC has met with unit IT leadership and identified six top unit priorities: procurement services research computing and services storage options SPG 601.27… Read More »
As Winter Break approaches, many of us are busy with holiday plans and are eager to finish up our work so we can relax with family and friends. But before you set up your away message and head out the door: Help U-M conserve energy and money over the break: Close and lock all windows to save energy and prevent… Read More »
While adaptive sports provide opportunities for children with mobility disabilities to participate in athletic events, these games are not designed for competitive play between kids with disabilities and those without. iGYM, an augmented reality game system created by a team of U-M researchers, is looking to change that. The current implementation of the system resembles soccer — or… Read More »
Packy, a furry, fun mascot is the symbol of the BackPac app created by U-M students to encourage others, particularly their peers, to spend some time volunteering in the community—especially during the holidays when the needs are great. “The number of volunteers has significantly gone down in the last decade,” said Gaurav Dhir, co-founder of BackPac and a… Read More »
Last year, HITS instituted a program called Home for Dinner, to help physicians use MiChart more efficiently. Provider exhaustion is a significant issue across the medical community. While MiChart, the electronic health record (EHR) at Michigan Medicine, can enhance coordination and quality of care, it can also have unintended negative consequences. Michigan Medicine providers are spending significant time… Read More »
Many cities and residents in Michigan have already begun to feel the effects of climate change. Such changes can damage the environment and public health. Trish Koman, a research investigator for the School of Public Health, and her colleagues have developed the Michigan Environmental Project, an online mapping tool designed to track climate change impacts in Michigan. The new… Read More »
Artificial intelligence that can hold a “real” conversation has long been one of the sci-fi standards of future technology. Enter the Amazon Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge. Among the ten schools from around the world selected to compete is a team from U-M co-advised by assistant professor David Jurgens from the School of Information and assistant professor Nikola Banovic in… Read More »
Svetla Sytch joined ITS Information Assurance (IA) as assistant director of privacy and IT policy on November 25. In this role, she will work with partners across the university to craft strategies and lead operational efforts that weave privacy, policy, and data governance into the way the university engages in its teaching, learning, research and administrative activities. “Svetla… Read More »
Mobius is a mobile-friendly, web-based portal that helps students, facility managers, faculty, and staff find the tools they need, and how to access the makerspaces that are available to them. Mobius is available to all members of U-M. Designed by MIT, Mobius helps members of the Make Impact Consortium navigate the vast array of resources used to make,… Read More »
An interdisciplinary group of U-M researchers turned to Twitter to see whether online discussions about food can help inform policy makers. They used community-based surveys to gather demographic and health-related behavior information that might help explain health status and disparities between groups, and whether there were differences between how groups of residents of a given region discussed food. Their… Read More »
With a shortage of new tuberculosis drugs in the pipeline, a software tool from U-M can predict how current drugs can be combined in new ways to create more effective treatments. Dubbed INDIGO (INferring Drug Interactions using chemoGenomics and Orthology) the application can also identify the genes that control these drug responses. “This could replace our traditional trial-and-error… Read More »
On November 19, 2019, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) named several award winners, including ARC-TS research cloud programmer senior, Bob Killen. Killen was one of six to earn the “Chop Wood Carry Water” award, given to CNCF community members who help behind the scenes, dedicate their time to open source projects, host and build community meetups, and… Read More »
Silicon integrated circuits, which are used in computer processors, are approaching the maximum feasible density of transistors on a single chip—at least, in two-dimensional arrays. Now, a team of engineers at U-M have stacked a second layer of transistors directly atop a state-of-the-art silicon chip. They propose that their design could remove the need for a second chip… Read More »
The Michigan Council of Women in Technology Foundation named Diane Jones its “Woman of the Year in Technology.” Jones is executive director of administration for Information and Technology Services and the Office of the CIO. The award recognizes women in Michigan leading or driving change for other women in information technology careers or fields of study. Jones has… Read More »
The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) recently announced the awardees of its first round of Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grants. Fifteen interdisciplinary teams will receive over $1 million in combined funding support for an array of exciting projects with data science as the common thread. The projects range from detecting patterns of illicit wildlife trade networks, to… Read More »
The percentage of websites protected with HTTPS secure encryption—indicated by the lock icon in the address bar of most browsers—has jumped from just over 40% in 2016 to 80% today. That’s largely due to the efforts of Let’s Encrypt, a nonprofit certificate authority co-founded in 2013 by J. Alex Halderman, a U-M professor of computer science and engineering.… Read More »