Beginning in January of 2019, Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research (CSCAR) will offer most of its workshops free of charge to U-M students, faculty, and staff. CSCAR is able to do this thanks to funding from U-M’s Data Science Initiative. Registration for workshops is still required, and seats are limited. CSCAR requests that participants please cancel their… Read More »
A cross-campus collaboration that moved UM-Dearborn to UM-Ann Arbor ITS’s MiBackup system has resulted in significant cost savings, increased efficiency, and reduced work effort. At the end of 2017, Dearborn’s primary server backup system had reached capacity. After consulting with Ann Arbor ITS, Dearborn ITS created a plan to migrate its failing backups over to the MiBackup service… Read More »
ITS Teaching and learning (T&L) is partnering with the School of Information (SI) and the School of Education (SOE) to develop learning analytics tools aimed at improving student performance. Equipped with evidence from past learning dashboard efforts, research faculty and graduate students in SI and SOE have been working with development staff from T&L on designing —and then… Read More »
The launch of a new research collaboration and a data center at the University of Michigan marks the start of a unique collaboration between U-M, Michigan State University, the Michigan Department of Education and the Center for Educational Performance and Information. The new Michigan Education Research Institute and Michigan Education Data Center will facilitate research projects in education,… Read More »
The Higher Education Data Warehousing Forum (HEDW) is a network of higher education representatives dedicated to sharing knowledge about data management, best practices, data warehousing designs, institutional reporting strategies and more. HEDW is now accepting proposals for the upcoming 2019 conference. To submit your proposal, please follow the link below. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 2018.… Read More »
Academic Reporting Tools (ART 2.0) serve the U-M community by exposing historical academic data including information about courses, instructors, and majors. ART 2.0 is a data visualization tool that will assist decision makers in accessing and analyzing U-M course and academic program data to help administration, faculty, and students make more informed decisions. In service of meeting this objective, ART… Read More »
Vaccinations, early detection, and new cures have led to incredible medical breakthroughs over the past several decades. Today, advancements in precision health, wearable technology, genetic sequencing, and big data analytics promise to reshape modern medicine even further. A critical, yet often overlooked factor in the advancement of healthcare is the underlying health IT infrastructure. As Michigan Medicine faces… Read More »
Recently, ARC-TS and the School of Information used the new Big Data platform Cavium ThunderX to reduce run times of the school’s analytics pipeline by a factor of 10, taking overall run time from almost a week to only a few hours. Cavium ThunderX is a free-to-use Big Data platform for researchers at U-M. Currently ThunderX supports mapreduce, Spark,… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is seeking pilot users for two new research services. The first, Locker, is group project storage focused on large data sets, and is available at a cost less than half that of current primary storage services. Locker still provides encryption, replication, snapshots, and workstation access. Example use cases for Locker are research… Read More »
Last month, the Medical School Office of Research launched Michigan Research Experts, a searchable, web-based database of research expertise designed for U-M and developed to foster collaboration. Several HITS teams worked for months with the Office of Research and a new vendor in support of the effort. HITS lent its expertise in the integration of thirteen databases to create a more powerful… Read More »
Ever needed higher-resolution aerial imagery than Google or ArcGIS basemaps offer? Or, more frequent historical imagery? Nearmap, for which the Library recently renewed university-wide access, meets both those goals for developed areas of the U.S. (Rural areas are not covered by this service.) Nearmap imagery has a resolution of less than 7.5cm (or <3-inches), as compared to the… Read More »
The U-M Tableau Symposium hosted by the Information Quest team on August 27 was a great success. Tableau representatives opened the symposium with some background on how Tableau got started and delved into a few example cases which highlighted the ways U-M, and more specifically Michigan Medicine, can leverage the platform’s capabilities. The keynote speaker gave a brief… Read More »
Today, the breakneck pace of biomedical discovery is outstripping clinicians’ ability to incorporate this new knowledge into practice. Charles Friedman, of the U-M Medical School, and his colleagues recently wrote about a possible way technology offers a solution for moving research out of journals and into the clinic faster. Their approach focuses on harnessing the power of technology to… Read More »
When the Equifax data breach impacting nearly 147 million people occurred just over a year ago most consumers took little to no action to protect themselves despite the risk of identity theft, U-M researchers found. In comprehensive interviews with 24 consumers, a team of researchers at the School of Information led by Yixin Zou and Florian Schaub found… Read More »
Each year, HITS receives more than 265,000 service tickets from the Michigan Medicine community requesting help with password resets, new device orders, video conferencing, software installations, and much more. Until recently, tickets were collected in two systems, making it difficult for HITS to obtain a holistic view of the types of requests coming in and to use that… Read More »
Kyle Schulz, data scientist, Yuanru Tan, learning design and accessibility fellow, and Rebecca Quintana, learning experience designer, won the Academic Innovation at Michigan (AIM) Analytics Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Dropout Prediction Challenge. The team members were given a random subset of learner data from the first four weeks of courses and the challenge was to predict a… Read More »
Sean DeMonner, ITS executive director of Teaching and Learning (TL), and Anthony Whyte, ITS-TL IT program manager, each received leadership awards at the 2018 IMS Global Learning Impact Leadership Institute held in Baltimore in May. DeMonner was recognized for leadership in higher education, while Whyte received his fourth consecutive IMS leadership award for his work leading the Caliper… Read More »
“Virtually all human activity in the modern world creates digital traces. It is our responsibility to ensure that the resulting data is protected and managed responsibly,” said Margaret Levenstein, director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the U-M Institute for Social Research. Levenstein is leading a project team working to create a “System of… Read More »
The Ross School of Business is getting on the data analytics train. The school announced recently that it will offer a new MBA concentration focused on business data and analytics beginning in the fall 2018 semester. The concentration, says Brad Killaly, associate dean of full-time and global MBA programs, is designed for MBA students looking to hone their… Read More »
Coursera recently named Christopher Brooks, assistant professor at the School of Information, a winner of its Outstanding Educator Award for Innovation for his teaching strategies in the online Applied Data Science with Python Specialization. His approach allows students are to use actual data in a low-stakes environment to solve problems that are relevant to their own communities,… Read More »