IBM fired U-M professor Lynn Conway for coming out as trans in 1968. 52 years later, the company apologized

By | December 2, 2020
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At a public event celebrating LGBTQ+ inclusion, the International Business Machines Corporation presented Lynn Conway, professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science, with a rare lifetime achievement award. The award accompanied IBM’s apology to Conway, which came 52 years after the company fired her for coming out as transgender.  In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Conway… Read More »

Major side-channel discovery wins NSA contest

By | December 2, 2020
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Spectre ghost image over code in background

The National Security Agency recently recognized a major breakthrough in the field of side-channel attacks as the winner of the 2020 Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper competition. Daniel Genkin, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, worked on the paper with collaborators from around the world. The winning paper, describing an exploit called Spectre, broke open a new… Read More »

Flint ITS FY20 annual report highlights successes

By | December 2, 2020
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UM-Flint ITS Annual Report 19/20

Flint Information Technology Services recently issued its annual report for FY20. (The entire report (PDF) is available online.) The report provides updates on the organization’s eight operational areas as well as bios of ITS professional staff. Below are highlights of the report: ITS-Classroom Services: ITS-Classroom Services completed a number of upgrades across general classroom spaces. After the transition… Read More »

Conversational assistants could be used to improve African American health around COVID-19

By | December 1, 2020
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hand holding mobile phone with medical graphic

U-M researchers say employing a conversational assistant could be one way to narrow the gap in health disparities impacting the African American community, particularly around the current COVID-19 pandemic. Lionel Robert, associate professor at the School of Information and senior author of a study in the journal Digital Government: Research & Practice, says a technological solution could keep… Read More »

Shop online safely

By | December 1, 2020
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hand holding credit card, hovering over laptop keyboard, shopping sites on the monitor

As the holidays approach and the pandemic continues, you are highly likely to be doing more online shopping. Protect yourself from scams and data theft with these tips from ITS Information Assurance. Shop with trustworthy sites and sellers. Stick to businesses you know and trust, and compare descriptions and prices from multiple sellers to help spot scams. Be… Read More »

Michigan Medicine SharePoint upgrade: Learning opportunities, development freeze, community of practice

By | November 30, 2020
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SharePoint Online logo

Michigan Medicine is upgrading its existing Microsoft SharePoint 2016 environment to SharePoint Online, a cloud-based service that will provide new opportunities for teams to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications. Pilots and testing are happening now, and HITS plans to introduce SharePoint Online across all of Michigan Medicine beginning in early 2021. In addition to significantly improving the… Read More »

Support for Sophos Antivirus on UM-owned machines to end December 2020

By | November 30, 2020
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A laptop with a magnifying glass and a shield hovering over it.

Support for Sophos Antivirus installed on U-M machines will end on December 31, 2020. Enhanced Endpoint Protection powered by CrowdStrike replaces Sophos. The Sophos product will continue to work, but will not be updated, and quickly will become deprecated. If you are responsible for managing university Macs, please ensure that you transition them to CrowdStrike Falcon for endpoint… Read More »

Engineering undergrads prep for a modern workforce with expanded data analytics courses and support

By | November 25, 2020
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In 2018, U-M Industrial and Operations Engineering (IOE) faculty set their sights on fully-preparing students for the modern workforce and advanced studies by incorporating computing and data analytics into many existing courses, creating a new advanced analytics course for seniors, and implementing a new help desk to support students. One of the main changes was to emphasize R and Python… Read More »

Young kids’ YouTube viewing dominated by consumerism, ads

By | November 24, 2020
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young boy watching YouTube on a tablet

A recent report by Michigan Medicine and non-profit Common Sense Media finds children are often consuming pervasive and inappropriate advertising, violence, and other questionable content while watching online videos. Children ages eight and under are now spending more time on YouTube than ever before, with online video viewing for the first time surpassing live television and streaming video… Read More »

2020 CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition highlights outstanding research

By | November 23, 2020
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Computer Science And Engineering held its seventeenth annual CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition on November 11, 2020. The competition recognizes the research done by PhD students at CSE and the final competition is the culmination of a process that narrows a field of entrants to a handful of finalists, each of whom gives a summary presentation on an… Read More »

Democratizing genetic data for cancer research

By | November 20, 2020
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graphic showing to people icons next to DAN strings.

By distilling information from hundreds of data sources, U-M Precision Health researchers have launched an open-access, online repository called Cancer PRSWeb that will help accelerate advancements in cancer prevention and prediction. The researchers created polygenic risk scores (PRS) for 35 cancer traits and then evaluated the scores using electronic health record data from the Michigan Genomics Initiative and the… Read More »

UM-Dearborn’s artificial intelligence center having great first year

By | November 20, 2020
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DAIR logo

U-M Dearborn founded the Dearborn Artificial Intelligence Research Center less than a year ago with a strategy of “think big, start small, and scale fast.” Organizers have already made impressive progress toward making AI one of Dearborn’s topline areas for research, education, and industry collaboration. Over the past year, several DAIR Center projects have won funding and the… Read More »

Dearborn prof’s wearable technology improves at-home physical therapy

By | November 19, 2020
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African American man doing exercise with a dumbell

Samir Rawashdeh, UM-Dearborn assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and a colleague have developed RehabBuddy, a physical therapy system that employs a wearable sensor that records a “map” of the correct movement of exercises. The RehabBuddy system starts with an in-person visit to a physical therapist. The patient wears a small sensor that records a “map” of… Read More »

Undergrads sign video game development deal

By | November 19, 2020
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Yolked video game grahic

A team of undergraduate students is on the path to releasing a commercial video game with Yolked – a game that began life as their final project in EECS 494, Introduction to Video Game Development. This is the first time that a team from the class has signed a funded publishing deal to deliver a polished up version of their… Read More »

Epic MegaGrant will support development of XR projects

By | November 18, 2020
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U-M’s Extended Reality (XR) Initiative, a part of the Center for Academic Innovation, received $120,000 from an Epic Games MegaGrant. CAI will use the funds to hire 20-30 student fellows over the next two years and educate them in different tools and processes like Unreal Engine, a game engine developed by the company Epic Games. “While the university has… Read More »

New tool automates popular system security technique

By | November 18, 2020
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illustration of sandbox with shovel over computer code background

Working with researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, Xinyu Wang, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, co-authored an award-winning paper that demonstrates how to automatically build sandboxing policies to keep a computer system safe. Sandboxing is a software management strategy that isolates applications from critical system resources and other programs. One common sandbox approach… Read More »

‘Extremely aggressive’ internet censorship spreads in the world’s democracies

By | November 17, 2020
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Navigate this 3D world map by clicking, holding and dragging the mouse cursor. See how censorship levels range around the globe. The largest collection of public internet censorship data ever compiled shows that even citizens of the world’s freest countries are not safe from internet censorship. A U-M team used Censored Planet, an automated censorship tracking system launched… Read More »

First digital single-chip millimeter-wave beamformer will exploit 5G capabilities

By | November 17, 2020
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The first fully-integrated single-chip digital millimeter-wave (MMW) beamformer, created by electrical and computer engineers at U-M, opens up new possibilities in high-frequency 5G communications. The technology could be used to improve vehicle-to-vehicle communication, autonomous driving, satellite internet, and national defense, to name a few. Beamforming allows a device that is transmitting signals to point them in a particular… Read More »

Jason Flinn honored with 2020 Mark Weiser Award

By | November 16, 2020
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Jason Flinn

Jason Flinn, professor of computer science and engineering, has been recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) with the 2020 Mark Weiser Award, a preeminent honor in the field of operating systems. The award recognizes a career of contributions “that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark… Read More »

U-M Data Science Annual Symposium covers wide range of topics

By | November 13, 2020
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MIDAS logo

The Michigan Institute for Data Science held its Data Science Annual Symposium Tuesday, November 10 and Wednesday, November 11. The keynote featured Lauren Klein, English professor at Emory University, and Catherine D’Ignazio, urban science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The pair discussed their book, “Data Feminism,” published last February. Klein and D’Ignazio introduced what they call the… Read More »