Facebook, with 1.79 billion monthly active users, has emerged as the main engine for “fake news.” Researchers say they’d like to help Facebook get to grips with its problem. But if you want to work with Facebook’s data, you usually have to become a contractor, work at its campus in Menlo Park, and agree to the company’s terms on what… Read More »
Students and faculty from the School of Education are working with students at Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor to help them become good digital citizens, and so they can become ambassadors for others in their school. Watch the video below to learn how the program hopes to foster civility and respect online.
“Fake” news is not limited to politics or celebrity gossip. A study by Ceren Budak, an assistant professor at the School of Information, shows that the most popular health stories on social media may also be the least accurate. For example, four out of five popular posts on Facebook about Zika contained accurate information, but the ones containing… Read More »
A team of researchers on the Ann Arbor and Flint campuses have developed a new Android app to help Flint residents during the ongoing water crisis. MyWater-Flint is an interactive guide that lets people pinpoint homes with a greater risk for lead, and also shows where lead has been found in city water. Users can see where pipes… Read More »
As part of this year’s Academic Innovation Initiative, the Office of Academic Innovation has challenged the U-M community to contribute more than 2,017 ideas about how we should transform education at Michigan. Visit the Ideas2017 Challenge website and enter a tweet-sized idea (or bigger). While you’re there, browse through ideas that have been submitted.
This past November I started at the University of Michigan, leaving behind a job and staff I have truly loved and stepping up to a new challenge more than halfway across the country. I thought I would get started by sharing a little bit about me, what drew me to Michigan, and what my role means for the… Read More »
When Canvas API calls began to bog down Student Explorer—an application that serves as an early warning system for academic advisors—Information and Technology Services (ITS) and the Digital Innovation Greenhouse (DIG) worked with Unizin to reduce data processing time by half with the Unizin Data Warehouse. Read the case study (PDF) to learn about their solution to provide reliable data… Read More »
Kelli Trosvig, U-M’s new vice president for IT and chief information officer (VPIT-CIO) as of November 14, has named Sol Bermann as the university’s interim chief information security officer (CISO). Bermann served as interim CISO prior to Don Welch’s arrival and continues to serve as U-M’s privacy officer.
Kudos to Ben Meekhof (ARC-TS), and Dan Kirkland and Dan Eklund (ITS) for their support of U-M faculty and staff presenting at SC16, a supercomputing conference hosted in Salt Lake City, November 13–17. The team established a dedicated 100G path from U-M to the SC16 conference center as well as high-speed paths from Indiana University, Michigan State University, and… Read More »
After recent attacks threw the rampant insecurities of internet-connected cameras, video recorders, and other gadgets into sharp relief, Washington lawmakers and officials are urging tech firms to do more to secure the Internet of Things. At a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing last month, lawmakers said the attacks raised national security concerns and questions about the need… Read More »
A recent article published in Communications of the ACM examines the chronology of medical device security. The paper is the result of an interdisciplinary project, known as Trustworthy Health and Wellness, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Peter Honeyman, U-M research professor of computer science and engineering, collaborated on the article. Learn more.
Sherif El-Tawil, professor and associate chair of civil and environmental engineering, was quoted in an article published by U.S. News about the effects of virtual reality technology in engineering education. Professor El-Tawil’s MIDEN virtual reality cave gives Michigan Engineers unprecedented insight into the way structures come together, buckle, and collapse.
Archaeologists in northern Michigan have used pulses of light shot from airplanes to double their discoveries. This remote sensing technology is called light detection and ranging, or lidar. Lidar sends out a pulse of light that returns a measure of distance from the object it strikes. It can greatly improve the efficiency of archaeological searches particularly when scanning… Read More »
A study published this month in the journal Health Affairs found problems with many smartphone health apps. Most concerning was what happened (or didn’t happen) with information that should have drawn warnings from the app—like selecting “yes” when the app asked if the user was feeling suicidal, or entering extremely abnormal levels for blood sugar levels. Only 28… Read More »
The Higher Education Data Warehouse (HEDW) selected Information Quest (IQ) to host their April 2019 Conference in Ann Arbor. “This is a huge honor and will allow us to showcase the University of Michigan and our work here in IQ,” said Shelly Turner, application developer lead for IQ who will also serve on the HEDW board from 2017… Read More »
Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are some of today’s most well-known virtual assistants. All are female, and all elicit an image of an assistant who is not just a woman, but a woman people can boss around, flirt with, and act inappropriately toward. Compound that with portrayals in the media and it all starts to feel… Read More »
A new Michigan IT Community of Practice is taking shape around augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems. Areas of interest include the use of these systems for visualization, teaching, content development, and performance. Meetings will begin in January (specific date TBA). Join the MCommunity group, AR and VR CoP, and the new Google+ community for more… Read More »
The New Year will bring more than just snow and fitness resolutions. In the first part of 2017, you can expect improvements to how the Michigan Newsletter is published and distributed. Take our reader survey to weigh in. Your feedback will inform the direction of Michigan IT news to better serve the community. We’ve already made some changes:… Read More »
Carrie Shumaker, formerly ITS assistant director for human capital management and student administration systems, accepted a position as the interim director of information technology, strategy, and operations at UM-Dearborn. Effective December 1, Shumaker will lead all Dearborn IT efforts, including applications, network, storage, architecture, and cybersecurity.
The networked electronics found in modern vehicles provide many useful and cool benefits, such as fuel savings, parking assist, and collision avoidance. Most of these features involve passing data among vehicle systems and human drivers. This connectivity also offers hackers new potential exploits. According to research presented last month by U-M researchers Kyong-Tak Cho and Kang Shin at… Read More »