Category Archives: Campus News

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Halderman testifies in Senate’s Russia probe

By | June 28, 2017
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J. Alex Halderman testifies at a Senate hearing

J. Alex Halderman (second from right), professor of electrical engineering and computer science, testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at a June 21 hearing titled “Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election.” It focused on the federal government’s role in safeguarding U.S. elections from outside interference. Halderman emphasized that “our highly computerized election infrastructure is vulnerable… Read More »

Data and your online identity

By | June 27, 2017
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John Cheney-Lippold, assistant professor of American culture at U-M and author of the book We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves, helps explain the difference between data that is trying to sell you a product, and data that truly knows who you are as a person. “I think we should take the idea of U.S. privacy… Read More »

Mcity uses AR to help test automated vehicles

By | June 27, 2017
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A research team in U-M’s Mcity Michigan Traffic Lab led by Professor Henry Liu has developed an augmented reality (AR) system that enables engineers and researchers to evaluate challenging and dangerous scenarios in a safe environment. The traffic lab controls all of the signalling and tracks the vehicles on the facility. It collects and archives data from those… Read More »

U-M participates with Help Desk Institute

By | June 16, 2017
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Lisa Callihan (LSA IT customer experience manager) presented at the HDI 2017 (Help Desk Institute) conference on May 11 in Washington D.C. Her presentation, Implementing a Major Incident Process, focused on the work she did in creating and implementing the ITS Significant Incident process used today. HDI is the professional association and certification body for the technical service and… Read More »

Can Alexa turn your kid into a brat?

By | June 14, 2017
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crying angry boy

Experts at the crossroads of pediatrics, psychology, and AI say there’s a lot we don’t know about how virtual assistants might affect young, developing minds. Jenny Radesky, a U-M pediatrician who studies how digital media shapes children, says research around how kids understand digital assistants is limited, and studies that do exist on children and robots suggest children see… Read More »

Good boy! Domesticating AI to protect humans

By | June 8, 2017
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golden retriever

U-M computer science professor Igor Markov believes an attack by artificial intelligence on humans would sort of be like when the Black Plague hit Europe in the 14th century, killing up to 50 percent of a populatioin that had no idea what was happening or why. “This would be illustrative of what you might expect if a superintelligent AI would… Read More »

U-M wins NCWIT NEXT Award

By | June 6, 2017
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The College of Engineering’s Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) division received a NCWIT Extension Services Transformation (NEXT) Award for excellence in efforts to attract undergraduate women to the field of computing. Sponsored by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) and Google, NEXT Awards honor academic departments that show improved outcomes in increasing women’s meaningful participation in computing education. CSE’s… Read More »

U-M team takes home IMS Global Leadership Awards

By | May 30, 2017
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Anthony Whyte and Lance E Sloan of ITS Teaching & Learning (TL) each received leadership awards at IMS Global’s Learning Impact Leadership Institute 2017 annual conference held in Denver May 16-19. Both were recognized for their work on the IMS Caliper Analytics™ specification. Also recognized was Charles Severance from the School of information who received the Bill Graves… Read More »

LSA & ITS team win President’s Staff Innovation Award

By | May 30, 2017
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Congratulations to Jeff Dils, Victoria Green, Chris Mueller and MaryBeth Stuenkel (ITS), and Monika Dressler (LSA) for receiving the Presidential Staff Team Award for Innovation for ExamScan, a new service that digitizes hand-written and graded exams and makes it easier for instructors to return and review exams with students. ExamScan allows large classes to conduct literature-based, data-driven examinations… Read More »

Assigning meaning to emojis

By | May 29, 2017
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Why is 😂  more popular than 😃 ? Why is a person more likely to use 👍  or 😘  to express appreciation ? These represent the types of questions School of Information doctoral student Wei Ai and his colleagues answered when they examined the use of emojis by one million users through more than 1.2 billion messages. The researchers analyzed the relationship of the… Read More »

Fauber receives Research Technical Staff Recognition Award

By | May 26, 2017
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Kudos to Bennet Fauber for receiving U-M Office of Research’s Research Technical Staff Recognition Award for the computing support and training he provided to researchers collecting and analyzing data on the function and structure of the human brain. Fauber is a senior applications programmer-analyst for Advanced Research Computing-Technology Services. The Research Technical Staff Recognition Award recognizes staff members who… Read More »

Large scale memory swapping

By | May 25, 2017
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Operators of large computer clusters have long searched for an efficient way to share server memory to speed up application performance. Now, U-M engineers led by Mosharaf Chowdhury, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, have developed open-source software that lets servers instantly “swap” memory from other servers in the cluster when they run out, instead of writing to slower storage media… Read More »

HITS hosts successful electronic health records conference

By | May 24, 2017
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Nearly 350 health care IT professionals from 11 different health systems recently gathered in Ann Arbor to share ideas and knowledge to improve patient care. The EHR Michigan User Group, or eMUG, is a collection of health systems in Michigan that use Epic electronic health records software. The 2017 eMUG conference was hosted by Michigan Medicine Health Information Technology &… Read More »

M-Write adds automated text analysis

By | May 22, 2017
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M-Write, a program built on the premise that students learn complex material by writing, will expand in fall 2017 to add automated text analysis (ATA) to its digital toolkit. M-Write was created by U-M professor of English Anne Gere, director of the Sweetland Center for Writing, and Ginger Shultz, assistant professor of chemistry. M-Write helps students develop their conceptual… Read More »

Apple acquires “dark data” startup Lattice

By | May 19, 2017
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Apple has acquired data mining and machine learning company Lattice, co-founded by Michael Cafarella, a professor of computer science at U-M, and Chris Re, a professor of computer science at Stanford. (Cafarella was the co-creator of Hadoop, a widely used big data processing technology.) According to the Lattice website, the startup was born out of a Stanford research… Read More »