News Feed

Five papers by CSE researchers at ASSETS 2024

CSE authors are presenting innovations in the area of accessibility, from non-visual image editing to sound modification in virtual reality.

Anhong Guo receives Google funding for live visual description platform for blind people

The grant will support Guo’s continued development of WorldScribe, a system that provides context-aware live visual descriptions of everyday surroundings for those who are blind or have low vision.

Dhruv Jain receives Google funding for enhanced sound awareness for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals

The grant will support Jain’s work to develop a comprehensive auditory scene understanding system.

Eight papers by CSE researchers at UIST 2024

CSE authors are presenting new research and innovations related to user interface technology.

Real-time visual description program for people with low vision wins Best Paper at UIST 2024

CSE authors were recognized for their development of WorldScribe, a program that generates live visual descriptions to assist people who are blind or have low vision.

Emily Mower Provost delivers keynote at ISBD 2024

She spoke on innovations in speech-based mental health modeling at the top international conference on bipolar disorder.

$1.2 million NSF funding for U-M research on surgical training

The researchers will apply computational methods to assess and enhance surgical training and patient outcomes.

Electric vehicle lessons cruise into Michigan classrooms

New curriculum in U-M professor’s digital education platform introduces K-8 students throughout Michigan to jobs in one of the state’s emerging industries.
Rolling Stone: August 17, 2024

Twitter Updated Its AI Chatbot. The Images Are A Dumpster Fire

Prof. Nikola Banovic is quoted in this Rolling Stone article about X/Twitter’s newly updated AI chatbot and its potential for spreading misinformation.
Bridge Michigan: July 17, 2024

Michigan needs quality teachers for universal high school computer science

In this opinion piece, Profs. Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson, along with Prof. Aman Yadav of Michigan State University, make the case for why Michigan high school students need computer science education in today’s world, supported by certification for teachers and professional development that is robust and ongoing.

You’re just a stick figure to this camera

The anonymity could reduce unnecessary surveillance in an age of smart devices.

CSE announces 2024 faculty promotions

Four faculty have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to research, education, and service in and beyond the CSE community.

Leveraging AI to improve video-based surgical learning

New tool can help surgeons quickly search videos and create interactive feedback, saving time while improving educational value for trainees.

Managing screen time by making phones slightly more annoying to use

Delaying a phone’s swiping and tapping functions forces users to think harder, making it easier for them to consider whether to keep scrolling.

Yasha Iravantchi receives Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship

Recognizing Iravantchi’s exceptional achievements and progress, the fellowship will support his ongoing research on privacy-preserving sensing for in-home health monitoring.

Divya Ramesh awarded Rackham Barbour Scholarship

Given to high-achieving women from Asian countries, the award recognizes Ramesh’s academic excellence and will support her continued research on algorithmic accountability for socially responsible AI.

Xinyue Chen awarded Rackham Barbour Scholarship

Awarded to women of high academic achievement from Asian countries, the Barbour Scholarship will support Chen’s research on the use of AI in human-human communication.

Hearing emotion: Redefining mental health monitoring via voice-based mood detection

Researchers at U-M have received a $3.6 million NIH grant to support their development of new digital phenotyping tools to better detect and measure symptoms of bipolar disorder via audio monitoring.

Mark Guzdial receives Monroe-Brown Foundation Education Excellence Award

The award recognizes Guzdial’s transformational impact on computer science education at U-M and beyond.

NSF funds U-M research on generative AI in STEM education

Prof. Xu Wang of CSE and Prof. Ying Xu of the School of Education have received an NSF award to support their research on teacher-AI collaboration to develop STEM educational resources.

NSF funds U-M initiative leveraging AI to teach students essay writing

The $850k grant will support a multidisciplinary initiative to use large language models as writing assistants for students.
World Economic Form: November 8, 2023

This smartphone tool helps people with visual disabilities us touchscreens

This video highlights how work led by Profs. Alanson Sample and Anhong Guo can make kiosks, ATMS, and other touchscreen interfaces accessible to individuals with visual disabilities or tremors. Brushlens is a smartphone case that helps users to perceive, locate, and tap buttons and keys on the touch screen menus.

2023 CSE Honors Competition highlights outstanding research by grad students

The competition recognizes PhD students in CSE for their excellent research contributions.
New Atlas: November 1, 2023

BrushLens tech could make touchscreen displays accessible to everyone

This article highlights BrushLens, a new device could help users with visual impairments, tremors, and spasms to use touchscreens independently.
Independent Living: November 1, 2023

Smartphone case workaround

This article highlights BrushLens, a new device could help users with visual impairments, tremors, and spasms to use touchscreens independently.

CSE researchers present new findings and tech at UIST 2023

CSE researchers have 2 papers and 4 demos appearing at the conference, covering new tech that improves accessibility, enhances user experience, and helps surgeons-in-training.

New phone case provides workaround for inaccessible touchscreens

Touchscreens are everywhere but not built for everyone. A new device could help bridge that gap, helping users access ticket kiosks, restaurant menus and more.

Mark Guzdial receives ICER Lasting Impact Award

Prof. Guzdial’s 2012 paper on subgoal-labeled instruction was recognized for its sustained influence on computing education

Dhruv Jain receives NIH grant to improve health education for people with sensory disabilities

Prof. Jain and his collaborators in Michigan Medicine will develop best practices to increase health literacy and access to information for patients with disabilities.

U-M hosts 2023 Midwest Programming Languages Summit

The Summit brought together researchers interested in programming languages and compilers from across the region to exchange ideas and promote collaboration.

Nikola Banovic receives NSF CAREER Award to advance explainable AI

Prof. Banovic aims to use human-AI interaction to explain and justify AI decisions to end users.

CSE welcomes new faculty to campus for the 23/24 academic year

Meet the new arrivals.

Two EECS PhD students receive Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Cameron Haire and Jiale Zhang have been selected as recipients of the prestigious fellowship, which aims to support forward-thinking PhD student research.

7th Summer School on Computational Interaction brings together human-computer interaction scholars from around the world

The University of Michigan hosted the seventh annual installment of the summer school, supporting the next generation of HCI researchers through applied skills training and lectures from thought leaders.

New apps for visually impaired users provide virtual labels for controls and a way to explore images

With VizLens, users can touch buttons while their phones read out the labels, and Image Explorer provides a workaround for bad or missing alt text

Dhruv Jain named Google Scholar to design accessible technologies for deaf and hard of hearing people

Jain is working to design next-generation accessible technologies to give DHH people better awareness of their surroundings.

Dhruv Jain named ACM SIGCHI VP for Accessibility

Jain will oversee SIGCHI’s efforts to make conferences, publications more accessible.
GizChina: May 5, 2023

Future is now – this revolutionary device can transform your body or a desk into a touchscreen

This article reports on SAWSense, a sensor system developed in Prof. Alanson Sample’s lab that allows for touch inputs to be made on a variety of surfaces.
New York Times: April 28, 2023

Your Next Fitness Coach Could Be a Robot

Professor Nikola Banovic is quoted on how AI-based fitness programs fail to replicate the social interactions that make training effective.

Researchers recognized at CHI for work on human-NLP system to create reading quiz questions

Their paper received an honorable mention for their work in making high-quality quiz questions easier to create.

Seven papers by CSE researchers presented at CHI 2023

30 University of Michigan researchers authored and co-authored papers spanning surveillance, virtual reality, algorithmic stigma, assistive technology, and sensing systems.

Jane Im earns 2023 Meta Research PhD Fellowship

PhD candidate Jane Im hopes to use the fellowship to advance research into how social media companies can better implement usable privacy controls.
Michigan Daily: April 11, 2023

UMich Perspectives: How are we dealing with AI?

In this article, Prof. Nikola Banovic speaks with The Daily on how people connect with computers, and how they use computers to connect with each other.

Dhruv Jain earns ACM SIGCHI dissertation award for research on new systems for sound awareness

The award recognizes the most outstanding research contributions from recently graduated PhD students within the HCI community.

Dhruv Jain earns dissertation award for work on sound accessibility

Jain’s dissertation investigated the creation and use of several sound awareness systems to better convey information to d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals while using augmented reality and Internet of Things devices.

2022 CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition highlights outstanding research

The competition recognizes top research done by PhD students at CSE.

Prof. Emily Mower Provost receives NSF grant for research in personalized emotion recognition

The project aims to create new and personalized speech emotion recognition approaches and to use these approaches to investigate how changes in emotion are related to changes in mental health.
Detroit Free Press: June 3, 2022

Opinion: We’ve developed a digital education model that works

Prof. Elliot Soloway writes about the U-M Center for Digital Curricula’s Collabirty tools that enable teachers and students to interact and collaborate seamlessly. It is accompanied by free, year-long, standards-aligned curricula for K-5.

Making collaborative online document editing accessible to blind users

The CollabAlly extension pulls together visual information in collaborative editing environments and makes them easy to access and navigate with audio cues.

Designing more accessible augmented reality for people with visual impairments

Prof. Anhong Guo is supported by the Google Research Scholar Program to devise techniques that enable blind users to access collaborative AR experiences.

Jane Im awarded Rackham Barbour Scholarship

The scholarship will support her work on creating safer social computing systems grounded in users’ consent.
WDET: March 4, 2022

Tracked and Traced: You are the product, thanks to surveillance capitalism

Prof. Alanson Sample discusses his lab’s work on PrivacyMic, a developing audio technology that protects user privacy by operating outside the normal frequency range for human ears.

NSF Grant to add “a teaspoon of computing” to non-CS classes

Teaspoon programming languages can broaden access to computing skills through incorporation in a variety of coursework.

Faculty team award for development of widely-used COVID-19 monitoring app

Throughout 2020 and 2021, the app’s questionnaire helped more than 2,500 employers in Michigan meet state requirements.

Yasha Iravantchi receives Meta PhD Fellowship

Iravantchi’s research focuses on developing novel and privacy-preserving sensing hardware for more immersive VR/AR.

New computational framework to understand aggressive cancer cell behavior

Cancer cell biologists have teamed up with computational scientists and experts in artificial intelligence to focus the power of these fields on understanding and overcoming heterogeneity in cancer.
December 2, 2021

Computer Science was always supposed to be taught to everyone, and it wasn’t about getting a job: A historical perspective

A popular blog post by Prof. Mark Guzdial explores the historical roots of computer science education.

Outstanding research recognized at Graduate Honors Competition

Five finalists from each CSE lab presented their work at the event’s final round.

Wireless electricity and safety: A Q&A with Alanson Sample

How the safety of a wireless charging room stacks up to that of a cell phone.
Fast Company: September 20, 2021

This magic room charges your phone as soon as you walk in

Prof. Alanson Sample discusses his new research, which created rooms with wireless electricity, enabling the use of lamps and fans and charging cells phones all without the need for power cords.
Communications of the ACM: September 1, 2021

The Role of Computer Science in Elite Higher Education: Seeing the Expert Blind Spot

A CACM blog by Prof. Mark Guzdial discussing the role of CS in preparing elite scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
Science Daily: September 1, 2021

Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans

The level of public acceptance of evolution in the United States is now solidly above the halfway mark, according to a new study co-authored by Prof. Mark Ackerman based on a series of national public opinion surveys conducted over the last 35 years.
World Economic Form: September 1, 2021

This entire room has been turned into a giant wireless charger

Researchers including Prof. Alanson Sample have developed a system to safely deliver electricity over the air, a development that could potentially turn entire buildings into wireless charging zones.

Will power cords go the way of land lines?

Room-size charging system powers lights, phones, laptops without wires

Less nosy smart speakers

Technology could capture household information without recording speech.

Three CSE papers at CHI 2021 recognized with honorable mentions

The papers dealt with issues of accessibility, privacy, and consent in technology.
Twilio: April 24, 2021

University of Michigan Combines Tech and Twilio to Support a Continuous Learning Environment for Thousands of Low-income Students

The University of Michigan Center for Digital Curricula, co-directed by Thurnau Prof. Elliot Soloway, uses Twilio Voice to allow students and teachers to communicate in real-time while completing assignments and to bridge the gap in distance learning and in-class learning.

How CS is changing education

Embedding coding into high school history class; building eBooks to broaden participation in computing; and rolling out digital tools for collaborative K-5 learning. Michigan researchers are taking on the big challenges to integrating computing into everyone’s education.

Incoming faculty Anhong Guo named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Science

This distinction recognizes young researchers with exceptional promise who are having an impact on the world.

Josh Meyer has built the software that your kids and teachers need

From his days as an online poker playing undergrad to his current role as a technology developer, Josh has discovered a passion – and built a platform – for online learning.

2020 CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition highlights outstanding research

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.

CSE researchers report over $11M in research grants last quarter

The awards were distributed to 18 different primary investigators.
University of Michigan: September 23, 2020

COVID-19 app built at U-M helps businesses stay open

A COVID-19 symptom checklist web app developed by students in classes taught by Profs. Sugih Jamin and Elliot Soloway is helping more than 2,500 Michigan employers meet state requirements to screen employees before they enter the workplace each day.

How a COVID-19 app built at U-Michigan is helping businesses stay open

New real-time employer dashboards provide “live-feed of data” as employees report their symptoms while also safeguarding users’ data privacy.

Teaching CS in history class

Computing is a tool for getting things done. Let’s teach it that way.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: September 14, 2020

Study: Pa. benefits screening tool may be telling potential applicants they don’t qualify

A study by two University of Michigan researchers found errors in a Pennsylvania public benefits screening tool that could have wrongly told people they were not eligible for benefits, when in fact they were.

Roadmap for teachers: U-M free online learning platform paves the way

K-5 teachers and students throughout Michigan are building thriving learning communities online by using free deeply-digital, standards-aligned curricula and platform developed by the U-M Center for Digital Curricula.
WWJ News Radio: September 14, 2020

Customizable Curricula Available from U-M Center

Prof. Elliot Soloway is interviewed on WWJ radio about the customizable digital curricula available from his Center for Digital Curricula. Over 20,000 students in Michigan are using the platform this Fall.
Communications of the ACM: September 8, 2020

3 Proposals to Change How We Teach Computing In Order to Reduce Inequality

Online instruction is here, whether we’re ready or not. Prof. Mark Guzdial offers three proposals for reducing inequality in computing education amid these radical changes to teaching.

Students lead the way on State of Michigan web application to help curb the spread of COVID-19

“I don’t think any of us expected a global pandemic at the end of our senior year, let alone being able to work on an application that helps address it.”

Web app, dashboard from U-M to inform Michiganders’ return to work

The web tools will help state officials identify potential hotspots as they reopen Michigan to business.

Research on human biases in AI learning earns best student paper award

The project, which received a best paper award, demonstrated that a certain bias in humans who train intelligent agents significantly reduced the effectiveness of the training.

How predictive modeling could help us reopen more safely

Graphical online simulation could spur more targeted COVID-19 protection measures.

Faculty Profile: Emily Mower Provost

Mower Provost talks about getting awards, doing industry research, understanding human behavior – and Star Wars.

K-12 online learning platform sees big rise in use

Daily webinars available for teachers interested in exploring the free customizable tools.

Nine CSE graduate students recognized by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program

The nine students represent a broad range of research areas in the department.
Michigan News: February 11, 2020

‘Alexa, let’s chat!’: U-M among 10 student teams worldwide advancing conversational AI

The U-M Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge team have made it to the semi-finals.

Michigan team competes in Amazon challenge to make AI more engaging

The team of twelve students is one of ten worldwide working to give Amazon’s Alexa more human-like conversational skills.

Learning the computational mindset – education researchers give perspective

The authors argue that modern children already think with computation after being shaped by the prolific digital tools that fill their lives
Communications of the ACM: October 18, 2019

If We Want Women to Persist in Computing, Teach Them Programming – At Any Age

Prof. Mark Guzdial writes about the need for early education if retention of women in CS is a goal.

DARPA Award for more responsive AI that combines human and machine

The goal of Lasecki’s proposal is to create methods for making AI systems more robust and flexible.

Guzdial receives SIGCSE outstanding educator award

Guzdial is a leading expert in the field of computing education, and was one of its earliest researchers.

‘Air traffic control’ for driverless cars could speed up deployment

Human-generated responses could remotely assist autonomous vehicles decision’s during times of uncertainty.

Transforming tools for some into a language for all

The efforts of computing education researcher Mark Guzdial span the challenges facing a young field

CSE welcomes 9 new faculty

Get to know the new arrivals.

Paper award for training computer vision systems more accurately

PhD student Jean Young Song offers an improved solution to the problem of image segmentation.

Study maps careers of CS PhDs using decades of data

The researchers identified movement between industry, academia, and government work, tracked the growth of important organizations, and built predictive models for career transitions and employer retention.

Computer science and business school students team up to create “intention” skill for Alexa

Inspired by a class on managing professional relationships, five recent University of Michigan graduates are developing an app that would mesh with Alexa to help nudge people when they’re out of sync with what they want.

“Stitching” together a web user from scattered, messy data

Even though we interact with different web services in different ways, there are clues in the data that can indicate trends and identify a unique profile.

Igor Markov named a top Quora writer for fifth year in a row

He has answered over 3800 questions on the Q&A site, with over 41 million views.

Mark Ackerman receives European CSCW Lifetime Achievement award

Prof. Ackerman recognized quite early how social context could harness computing technologies for the development of systems in expertise finding and sharing, as well as in collaborative information access.

Codeon is the intelligent assistant for software developers

With Codeon, developers can request help by speaking their requests aloud within the context of their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

Kurator Will Help You Curate Your Personal Digital Content

Kurator is a hybrid intelligence system leveraging mixed-expertise crowds to help families curate their personal digital content, including videos and photos.

Movie design for specific target audiences

Researchers are working to design a successful movie that will attract the interest of a targeted demographic by leveraging user ratings, reviews, and product characteristics.

CHORUS: The Crowd-Powered Conversational Assistant

Researchers have developed a crowd-powered conversational assistant, Chorus, and deployed it to see how users and workers would interact together when mediated by the system.

Social interaction patterns provide clues to real life changes

The identified changes in social media behavior may point to real events and changes, some of which can benefit from intervention.

Sang Won Lee receives Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship for research into facilitating collaboration for creative and artistic tasks

Lee investigates how we can coordinate collaboration among users and crowd workers, especially for complex tasks that require creativity.

Sang Won Lee receives award for Best Student Composition at the International Computer Music Conference

This performance is an outcome coming from his interdisciplinary research work, Live Writing, which transforms asynchronous written communication into a real-time experience in the context of programming, writing and performing arts.

Collecting data to better identify bipolar disorder

Prof. Emily Mower Provost is collaborating to develop new technologies that provide individuals with insight into how the disease changes over time.

Walter Lasecki and collaborators win Best Paper at W4A

The paper explores how automated speech recognition and crowd-sourced human correction and generation of transcripts can be traded off to improve accuracy and latency.

Emily Mower Provost Receives Oscar Stern Award for Research in Emotion Expression and Perception

The proposed work investigates computational methodologies to differentiate emotion perception patterns of healthy controls and individuals with Major Depressive Disorder or Bipolar Disorder.

Patrick O’Keefe awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

“I am confident we can do better than the ubiquitous keyboard and mouse paradigm, and I intend to find out how,” said O’Keefe.