Society’s ever-increasing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging computing technologies has led many in the field to talk about the need for ethics, standards, and policies to help guide their use. Among the concerns over the increasing use of AI and data-based algorithms are gender and racial stereotyping, and an overall lack of accountability and digital justice.… Read More »
The U-M Library has more than 300 separate digital collections that contain over one million items. A significant portion are available without restriction to anyone to discover and engage with. While there has long been a way that users can search across these text and image collections, or within a particular collection, until recently this was not available through the… Read More »
Are you (or one of your colleagues) working on an instructional, research, or outreach project that would benefit from two intense days of collaboration with U-M Library specialists? Are you available to join us on May 7-8, 2020? If your answer is yes and yes, we invite you to apply to U-M Library’s 2020 Scholar Sprints. Scholar Sprints offer… Read More »
Precision Health (PH) at U-M takes a multidisciplinary approach to prevention, implementation, and community health and is a key HITS collaborator. PH studies are tracked within LabVantage, a lab information management system that supports study protocols and designs, follows a chain of custody process for samples, and creates an audit trail. PH studies comprise 70,000 patients. Using data… Read More »
One hundred gigabits per second (Gbps) is the new standard for network speeds when transferring files from the Great Lakes high-performance computing cluster to the Turbo Research Storage service. Why is this significant? Usually network speeds for file transfers are 1Gbps. That’s perfectly fine for most people’s needs. But reaching speeds of 100Gbps represents a new, higher level… Read More »
Advanced Research Computing — Technology Services (ARC-TS) provides advanced, high-performance computing resources to U-M researchers. They recently announced the extension of the free pilot periods for two of its most recently added services: the Great Lakes cluster and the HIPAA-aligned Armis2 cluster. The free pilot for both services has been extended to January 5, 2020. Billing begins on… Read More »
Many cities and residents in Michigan have already begun to feel the effects of climate change. Such changes can damage the environment and public health. Trish Koman, a research investigator for the School of Public Health, and her colleagues have developed the Michigan Environmental Project, an online mapping tool designed to track climate change impacts in Michigan. The new… Read More »
Celebrate Data Privacy Day on January 28 by attending the Privacy@Michigan symposium. Kathleen Kingsbury, editor of The New York Times Privacy Project, will give the keynote address. Additional privacy experts, to be announced in January, will participate in two panel discussions: It Takes a Village: Multi-Disciplinary Voices on Privacy and Ethics in a Hyper-Connected Age I Always Feel… Read More »
An interdisciplinary group of U-M researchers turned to Twitter to see whether online discussions about food can help inform policy makers. They used community-based surveys to gather demographic and health-related behavior information that might help explain health status and disparities between groups, and whether there were differences between how groups of residents of a given region discussed food. Their… Read More »
With a shortage of new tuberculosis drugs in the pipeline, a software tool from U-M can predict how current drugs can be combined in new ways to create more effective treatments. Dubbed INDIGO (INferring Drug Interactions using chemoGenomics and Orthology) the application can also identify the genes that control these drug responses. “This could replace our traditional trial-and-error… Read More »
Silicon integrated circuits, which are used in computer processors, are approaching the maximum feasible density of transistors on a single chip—at least, in two-dimensional arrays. Now, a team of engineers at U-M have stacked a second layer of transistors directly atop a state-of-the-art silicon chip. They propose that their design could remove the need for a second chip… Read More »
The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) recently announced the awardees of its first round of Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grants. Fifteen interdisciplinary teams will receive over $1 million in combined funding support for an array of exciting projects with data science as the common thread. The projects range from detecting patterns of illicit wildlife trade networks, to… Read More »
University of Michigan researchers are studying the Russian government’s widespread internet censorship and monitoring. Its campaign to control its citizen’s access to the internet is easily exportable, even in a decentralized internet service environment.
The relationship between research and IT is complex. Erin Dietrich, HITS senior director, and her team team are on a mission to strengthen the relationship between researchers and HITS, improve the customer experience, and raise awareness of IT services. “In developing a strategy and vision for research IT, we have focused on defining the services needed to support… Read More »
UM-Dearborn’s professor Birhanu Eshete, computer science, is developing new technology to keep up with malicious parties on the dark web. Eshete is in a continuous race against cyberattackers who wield weapons that are ever-evolving.
Data science is an important tool that can help researchers tackle challenges ranging from mobility and health to public safety and education. But having access to information comes with great responsibility, so researchers at the University of Michigan are working to ensure data science is not misused to disproportionately harm underrepresented groups.
Michigan Medicine researchers have developed an algorithm to be used with consumer sleep trackers. The algorithm, built by post-doctoral research fellow in neurology Olivia Walch, outperforms expensive medical trackers. The University of Michigan algorithm could be used on consumer wearable devices in the future and would be a more transparent, scientifically rigorous tool.
The Armis2 service is the go-to cluster for sensitive data, and is available to all U-M researchers. Key features of Armis2 HIPAA-aligned 24 standard nodes using the Intel Haswell-processor, each with 24 cores. More capacity will be added soon Slurm provides the resource manager and scheduler The scratch storage system will provide high-performance temporary storage for compute jobs.… Read More »
U-M will anchor the Detroit Center for Innovation, a 14-acre center in downtown Detroit aimed at stimulating entrepreneurial activity, educating students and further diversifying the regional economy. The center will be designed to provide a new talent pipeline to current companies and attract new businesses to the area. In accepting the invitation to be a key partner in… Read More »
UM-Dearborn Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science Mohamed Abouelenien is exploring whether machine learning can help create a customized, responsive climate control system that would automatically detect a person’s level of “thermal comfort” and then make continuous adjustments to their environment. Abouelenien and his collaborator, UM-Flint Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Mihai Burzo, used a thermal camera… Read More »