Tag Archives: research

U-M researchers create world’s smallest computer

By | July 4, 2018

A team of researchers from U-M have created a computing device that is 0.3 mm, many times smaller than a grain of rice. That beats IBM’s March claim of creating the world’s smallest computer. However, unlike most existing devices—which retain their programming and data even when they are not externally powered—these new microdevices from IBM and now Michigan lose all… Read More »

Crowdsourcing in milliseconds

Walter Lasecki, assistant professor in the College of Engineering and in the School of Information, has co-authored a paper introducing the “look-ahead approach,” a hybrid intelligence workflow that enables instantaneous crowdsourcing systems that can return crowd responses within milliseconds. According to the published paper, “Bolt: Instantaneous Crowdsourcing via Just-in-Time Training:” …real-time crowdsourcing has made it possible to solve… Read More »

U-M researchers strive to keep confidential data safe

“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 »

HITS supports research innovation at Cores Technology & Services Showcase

  The latest technologies and services available in biomedical research, all in one place. The Core Technology & Services Showcase on June 7 brought hundreds of faculty, students, and staff from the Biomedical Research Core Facilities (BRCF) together with dozens of partner vendors, including Health Information Technology & Services. Cores are centralized facilities or labs that offer shared… Read More »

Mingyan Liu named 2018 Distinguished University Innovator

Mingyan Liu, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was awarded the Distinguished University Innovator Award for her work in helping develop a new approach to enhance cybersecurity. She and her colleagues achieved this by using technology that predicts with up to 90 percent accuracy the likelihood that a company will be exploited by cyber criminals within the next… Read More »

U-M joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) at U-M has recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an organization that advances the development and use of cloud native applications and services. U-M is the second academic institution to join the foundation, and the only one in the U.S. “Our membership in the CNCF signals our commitment to… Read More »

Research projects use IT to explore physical performance and health

By | May 9, 2018

The U-M Exercise and Sport Science Initiative awarded $800,000 in funding to six teams as part of its second round of pilot grants. The winning projects include: Sensor technology and complex analytics to assess, monitor and predict injury in elite baseball pitchers A data-driven, non-invasive approach for monitoring hydration status in athletes A projection-based augmented reality system for… Read More »

Computers running at the speed of light?

Researchers from Germany and the University of Michigan have recently demonstrated in a study that infrared laser pulses can shift electrons between two different states, 1 and 0, in a sheet of semiconductor. Their research could help make quantum computing devices, which operate millions of times faster than a conventional computer, a reality. “Ordinary electronics are in the… Read More »

EMERSE: Michigan Medicine’s powerful medical record search engine

Any note or document that is written by a medical professional (like a doctor, pharmacist, nurse, or social worker) is called free text, meaning anything goes—from syntax errors to misspellings to abbreviations, and more. That’s tough for a search engine to navigate. To get any information at all for things like research studies or billing information, users would have… Read More »

Erin Dietrich joins HITS as senior director for Research Applications & Advanced Computing

  Erin Dietrich joined Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) as the new senior director for Research Applications & Advanced Computing in March. As a member of the HITS senior team, Erin provides leadership for operational coordination and strategic guidance of the information technologies and services that support the research mission of Michigan Medicine. She works with U-M… Read More »

Connecting music and big data

By | April 23, 2018

Four U-M research teams will receive support for projects that apply data science tools to the study of music theory, performance, social media-based music making, and the connection between words and music. The funding is provided under the Data Science for Music Challenge Initiative through the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). The projects include digital analysis of… Read More »

New “Great Lakes” cluster to replace Flux

Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS) is starting the process of creating a new, campus-wide computing cluster, “Great Lakes,” that will serve the broad needs of researchers across the university. Over time, Great Lakes will replace Flux, the shared research computing cluster that currently serves over 300 research projects and 2,500 active users. The existing Flux cluster… Read More »

New research computing package for Michigan Medicine

Research labs and teams sometimes spend a large amount of sponsored grant funding on data storage and computing resources. Researchers often have to choose between data safety and saving money, resulting in decreased productivity, and time wasted on data recovery. Beginning March 5, 2018, Health Information Technology & Services (HITS), in partnership with Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS),… Read More »

Workshop offers IT tips for research travel

The flight is booked, the reservations made. You’re about to embark on your research trip to another country, time zone, continent…maybe all of the above. Understandably, you’ve focused on the logistics, and now you’re focused on the research fun. But, if you want to ensure a crisis-free experience, there’s another travel plan you need to make: the IT… Read More »

U-M leads new $32M computer design center

By | January 19, 2018

As the computing industry struggles to maintain its historically rapid pace of innovation, a new, $32 million center based at U-M aims to streamline and democratize the design and manufacturing of next-generation computing systems. The Center for Applications Driving Architectures, or ADA, will develop a transformative, “plug-and-play” ecosystem to encourage a flood of fresh ideas in computing frontiers… Read More »

Memristors power quick-learning neural network

By | December 26, 2017

A new type of neural network made with memristors can dramatically improve the efficiency of teaching machines to think like humans. The network, called a reservoir computing system, could predict words before they are said during conversation, and help predict future outcomes based on the present. The research team that created the reservoir computing system, led by Wei… Read More »

U-M research in AI & machine learning is booming

By | December 15, 2017

Research using machine learning and artificial intelligence—tools that allow computers to learn about and predict outcomes from massive datasets—has been booming at U-M. The potential societal benefits being explored on campus are numerous, from on-demand transportation systems to self-driving vehicles to individualized medical treatments to improved battery capabilities. The ability of computers and machines generally to learn from… Read More »

U-M study examines Twitter style of India’s PM Modi

By | November 30, 2017

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has more than 36 million followers on Twitter, used political humor and sarcasm to become broadly appealing and refashion his political style, according to a U-M study of his tweets led by Joyojeet Pal, assistant professor of information. The study, published in the International Journal of Communication, shows that Modi tweets under nine broad themes: cricket, opposition… Read More »

U-M partners with Cavium on Big Data computing platform

A new partnership between the University of Michigan and Cavium Inc., a San Jose-based provider of semiconductor products, will create a powerful new Big Data computing cluster available to all U-M researchers. The $3.5 million ThunderX computing cluster will enable U-M researchers to, for example, process massive amounts of data generated by remote sensors in distributed manufacturing environments, or by… Read More »