The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is establishing an open-access archive, DataLumos, where the public can archive valuable government data resources, ensuring their long-term availability. ICPSR, a center within U-M’s Institute for Social Research, has joined widespread efforts to preserve valuable U.S. government data that may be hard to find or inaccessible in the future. “We… Read More »
Thirty years ago, the digital technology we rely on today wasn’t just unavailable; it was inconceivable. And yet at Michigan Engineering, a young PhD student named Thomas Knoll was quietly creating a piece of software that endures today as one of the world’s most popular applications. It would turn countless industries on their heads: marketing, advertising, publishing and… Read More »
Computer Showcase will make a donation to Dance Marathon at the University of Michigan for every trade-in through April 1. Here’s what happens when you trade up your old tech at Computer Showcase through April 1: You get instant store credit toward a new technology purchase. We donate an extra 10% of your trade-in value to Dance Marathon… Read More »
Elizabeth Bruch, a professor in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems and the Department of Sociology, has been working with colleagues in LSA to figure out exactly how people find romance online. They’ve seen some telling patterns in how people choose partners. Bruch and her colleagues examined romantic encounters in an online dating service—more than one… Read More »
Only a decade ago, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. The mobile app boom came afterward, helping to make services like Uber, Twitter, Instagram, and Tinder household names. We’re still feeling the effects that technological change is having on our culture and relationships, says Nicole Ellison, a professor at the School of Information. We may reach a point where… Read More »
Snapchat’s ability to court a young demographic has been one of its defining characteristics and the pillar of its success. But as the company prepares for its stock market debut, the photo and video messaging app’s reliance on users under the age of 25 could also be one of its biggest liabilities. “It’s the rocks many ships have… Read More »
On Tuesday, February 7, forged emails carrying messages of hate were sent to several College of Engineering email groups from an anonymous email server. The messages were “spoofed” so they appeared to come from an engineering faculty member and a doctoral student. They did not send the messages. The U-M Police Department and the FBI are conducting a joint… Read More »
A growing number of colleges and universities are using what is known as predictive analytics to spot students in danger of dropping out. Crunching hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of student academic and personal records, past and present, they are coming up with courses that signal a need for intervention. First year students at U-M began using a… Read More »
High-tech employees working in states that enforce noncompete agreements suffer for it in lower wages and reduced job mobility. Jagadeesh Sivadasan, an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Ross School of Business, compared data for workers in states that strongly enforce noncompete clauses with those that do not. “Companies use noncompete agreements to protect… Read More »
When queued up for an event, to buy a latte or waiting for a bus, most people whip out their phones to pass the time—most often within seconds of arriving. Daniel Kruger of the Institute for Social Research was curious about how quickly people used their phones while passing the time waiting. So he set out to determine… Read More »
Most Americans have some concerns that self-driving cars can be hacked to cause crashes, disable the vehicle in some way, or even be used as weapons by terrorists, according to researchers Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle of the U-M Transportation Research Institute. And large percentages of people are at least slightly concerned that these kinds of vehicles can be… Read More »
A panel on AI ethics and education in San Francisco hosted by the Future of Life Institute warned about unforeseen consequences if researchers ignore the inherent ethical dilemmas in the emerging technology. Benjamin Kuipers, a computer science professor and AI researcher at U-M, explained that although humans program AI-powered robots to accomplish a particular goal, these robots will typically… Read More »
Data dashboards and performance feedback can motivate middle-range students to work a little harder to earn a desired grade, a new study found. The study, conducted by researchers at the School of Information and the educational technology company Blackboard, explores a growing trend in higher education—that of collecting data about students and presenting it to them at important… Read More »
Symptoms that patients describe to doctors may not always be documented in electronic medical records, a small study suggests. To test out how well the records match reality, researchers compared symptoms that 162 patients checked off on paper-based questionnaires with the information entered in patients’ electronic charts at eye clinics. Roughly one-third of the time, data on blurry… Read More »
U-M collects video games. Lots of them. The university’s Computer and Video Game Archive features more than 7,000 titles—everything from time-honored favorites such as “Pac-Man” and “Frogger” to newer fare, including “Call of Duty” and “Halo”—on dozens of gaming systems. Now in its 10th year, the CVGA collects video games in the same way that other archives pursue books,… Read More »
Hacks and data breaches continue to make headlines—including during the presidential election—but that hasn’t seemed to worry consumers, or even many policymakers. M.S. Krishnan, the Accenture Professor of Computer Information at the Ross School of Business, says that while security breaches haven’t changed consumer behavior, it’s time for a cybersecurity summit. Krishnan, who is also professor of technology and… Read More »
During the US election, many fake news stories were written, not by politically motivated supporters, but by people looking to make some quick cash. So one way to stop fake news would be to eliminate the financial incentives that make it profitable. “To make any decent money, and a lot of the fake news sites do make decent… Read More »
Does your digital assistant know who it’s talking to? A wearable device prototype could let voice-controlled assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa recognize their owner so they don’t take orders from anyone else. The VAuth device, developed by U-M computer scientists Huan Feng and Kassem Fawaz, uses an accelerometer hidden in a pair of glasses or earphones… Read More »
More than 275 volunteers from U-M and around the community converged on Shapiro Library on January 27 and 28 in an emergency effort to preserve scientific data that is at risk of disappearing from government websites. The effort, called Ann Arbor Data Rescue, was organized by librarians and students at U-M and is part of the national Data Refuge project… Read More »
My first 12 weeks at U-M have been a whirlwind of activity, and I’m learning as quickly as I can. I’ve had the pleasure of talking with many IT leaders about our goals, challenges, and opportunities to work better together. IT plays large and vital roles in enabling the university’s missions of education, research and patient care. And,… Read More »