MENU In the Media
Trump’s Plan to Stop Violence Via Smartphone Tracking Isn’t Just a Massive Privacy Violation
Prof. Emily Mower Provost spoke with Slate about the new HARPA proposal. She and her colleagues were skeptical.
Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang – 40 Under 40
Profs. Lingjia Tang and Jason Mars co-founded Clinc AI, developing personal assistants for a variety of applications.
Yes, tech companies may listen when you talk to your virtual assistant. Here’s why that’s not likely to stop
Prof. Jason Mars weighs in.
Yes, tech companies may listen when you talk to your virtual assistant. Here’s why that’s not likely to stop
EECS-CSE professor Florian Schaub explains privacy concerns that stem from assistants like Alexa.
How to Defraud Democracy
Prof. J. Alex Halderman writes a worst-case cyberwarfare scenario for the 2020 American presidential election.
Researchers wrote an algorithm that can undetectably change scanned ballot images
Digital images of scanned-in paper ballots can be easily modified to change the results of an election, according to research published by Prof. J. Alex Halderman.
Michigan co-launches competition to help build the next generation of AI-driven dialog systems
IBM Research AI and the University of Michigan are spearheading the development of algorithms that can learn goal-oriented dialog interactions effectively from human-to-human chatlogs by organizing a public competition to inspire and evaluate novel approaches that will lead to the next generation of AI-driven dialog systems.
Overcoming Challenges in Building Enterprise AI Assistants
U-M researchers including Prof. Walter Lasecki, postdoc Jonathan Kummerfeld, and PhD student Sai Gouravajhala partnered with IBM research to address one of the main challenges in existing state-of-the-art AI assistants. Their paper works to disentangle conversations that are mixed together in a single stream of messages.
To foil hackers, this chip can change its code in the blink of an eye
EECS-CSE professor Todd Austin explains how Morpheus’ rapid churning can thwart potential hackers.
Harvard’s Tiny, Solar-Powered Flying Robot
EECS-CSE assistant professor Shai Revzen shares his thoughts on Harvard’s flying robot and predicts the future of micro-flying air vehicles.
Hold ’Em or fold ’em? This A.I. bluffs with the best
Michael Wellman, the Lynn A Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, explains how AI-playing Texas Hold ‘Em could drive cybersecurity advancements.
Elizabeth Warren just released a plan to protect American elections
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman explains what it would take to protect elections in the United States.
GitHub Releases New Tools to Report Vulnerabilities
The new features came out the same day as a study by Prof. Atul Prakash that found many open-source projects lack a clear way to report security problems.
Analog AI Accelerator Startup Raises $30m
AI accelerator chip start-up Mythic, founded in 2012 at U-M by EECS alumnus Mike Henry and Dave Fick, has raised $30 million in a B1 funding round.
Google Stadia has kicked off a new age of gaming data harvesting
John L Tishman Professor of Engineering John Laird tells Wired computer games are a valuable tool for analyzing human behavior and decision-making skills.
Privacy policies are too complicated to understand, new analysis confirms
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Florian Schaub explains how many privacy policies are unfair to consumers.
Voting tech creates growing concern for local officials
EECS-CSE graduate student instructor Matt Bernhard explains the risks of not addressing voting security concerns.
2018 Nobel Prize Laureate Gérard Mourou talks high-intensity optics
Professor Emeritus Gerard Mourou’s lecture at the University of Michigan is covered by Michigan Daily.
Top universities in U.S. targeted by Chinese hackers
Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer and Clinical Professor of EEC-CSE Ravi Pendse explains the unique cybersecurity risks universities face, Inside Higher Ed reports.
As 2020 nears, pressure grows to replace voting machines
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman stresses the importance of the federal government funding new technologies to improve the security of U.S. elections, as reported by New York Times.
Are our voting systems secure?
Diane Rehm interviewed EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman to discuss election security risks ahead of 2020 presidential primaries.
What the U.S. can learn about electronic voting from this tiny Eastern European nation
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses the risks of online voting in Estonia with Time Magazine.
Ann Arbor’s May Mobility raises $22 million to deploy driverless shuttles across US
May Mobility secures $22 million investment amid expansion
Self-driving cars could deploy sooner using ‘air traffic control’ technique, U-M researchers say
EECS-CSE assistant professor Walter Lasecki explains how new research will allow driverless vehicles to make decisions during times of uncertainty.
Research team investigating Internet censorship with tracking system
EECS-CSE research assistant professor Roya Ensafi explains how Censored Planet monitors censorship online.
A poker-playing robot goes to work for the Pentagon
Michael Wellman, the Lynn A Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, discusses how AI might help in military decision-making with Wired.
The elite intel team still fighting Meltdown and Spectre
Parabricks finds a niche to target its computing power
University of Michigan spinoff company Parabricks is featured in Crain’s Detroit Business.
Online censorship in Saudi Arabia soared after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
Censored Planet, an internet censorship project lead by EECS-CSE research assistant professor Roya Ensafi, detected a sharp uptick in censorship following the killing of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi.
The Malware of the Future Will Have AI Superpowers
Research delving into neural network vulnerabilities done in part by EECS-CSE professor Atul Prakash and U-M graduate students is discussed in Gizmodo.
People Who Buy Smart Speakers Have Given Up on Privacy, Researchers Find
A U-M study that included EECS-CSE assistant professor Florian Schaub looked at smart home devices like Alexa and users opinion of privacy after owning one.
A moral code for computer scientists
In an interview with Stateside, EECS-CSE Professor H. V. Jagadish says that businesses should do more to incorporate data ethics into their practices.
This is the most important moral question about self-driving cars
EECS-CSE professor Benjamin Kuipers discusses self-driving cars’ decision-making process with Vox.
J. Alex Halderman on Election Systems and Vulnerabilities
Alex Halderman discusses election systems and vulnerabilities ahead of midterm elections with C-Span.
Don’t kid yourself, U.S. enemies are trying to hack our elections
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses election hacking and vulnerabilities ahead of midterms.
Parabricks finds a niche to target its computing power
EECS-CSE professor Scott Mahlke and U-M spin-off Parabricks are featured.
The internet security company Dug Song is betting on
Internet security company Censys is detailed by Crain’s Detroit Business.
A look at the election security charges in Georgia’s governor’s race
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses election vulnerabilities ahead of the midterms with PBS.
How to hack an election
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses voting machine vulnerabilities ahead of midterm elections.
Here’s how an AI lie detector can tell when you’re fibbing
EECS-CSE professor Rada Mihalcea discusses her research and how they trained an algorithm to detect lies.
Should You Be Afraid of Election Hacking? Here’s What Experts Say
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses election security ahead of midterms.
The midterms are already hacked. You just don’t know it yet.
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman and grad student Matt Bernhard discuss election security risks with Vox.
Self-driving cars will have to decide who should live and who should die. Here’s who humans would kill.
EECS-CSE professor Benjamin Kuipers discusses a new study that delves into the decisions automated cars could make in the future.
The campaign for mobile-phone voting is getting a midterm test
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses election security ahead of midterms.
How hackable are American voting machines? It depends who you ask
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses voting machine vulnerabilities ahead of the midterm elections.
Facebook hack: What to do if you’re affected
EECS-CSE professor Kevin Fu suggests security measures Facebook users should implement after the latest hack.
Stateside: Wisconsin’s suspect water diversion, UM orchestra gives sci-fi film a live soundtrack
Alec Gallimore, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, talks about the twin roles that music and science play in Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The film was shown with accompanying live orchestra and chorus at Hill Auditorium Friday, September 21.
How to hack an election—and what states should do to prevent fake votes
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman presented his election hacking findings at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.
Judge weighs whether Georgia must switch to paper ballots
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman says election meddling has gone from an internal interference to interference from outside governments; particularly Russia.
Is Trump taking on Russia? President authorizes sanctions on countries that interfere in elections
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman says if Russia plans to interfere in U.S. midterms, they’re probably already in our election systems.
To cripple AI, hackers are turning data against itself
EECS-CSE researcher Kevin Eykholt discusses machine learning with Wired.
Cuba’s “sonic attack” on the U.S. Embassy could have been merely sounds emitted by a listening device
EECS-CSE professor Kevin Fu’s research done in collaboration with Zhejiang University researchers is referenced in Scientific American.
Security upgrades are too little, too late for 2018 midterms, and race is already on for 2020, experts say
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman discusses election security with Newsweek.
New system can detect fake news better than humans
EECS-CSE professor Rada Mihalcea and her fake news detector research are highlighted in New Indian Express.
Algorithm beats humans for sniffing out fake news
Futurity shares the fake news detector research story done in collaboration with Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor Rada Mihalcea.
This fake news detection algorithm outperforms humans
The Next Web delves into the fake news detector research done in collaboration with Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professor Rada Mihalcea.
Researchers claim new algorithm beats humans at spotting fake news
Research led by EECS-CSE Rada Mihalcea highlights a new method for detecting fake news.
Fake news detector algorithm works better than a human
University of Michigan develops fake news detector to fight misinformation
Why election security experts really like paper records
EECS-CSE professor Alex Halderman talks election security with Marketplace Tech host host Tracey Samuelson.
Microsoft: Here’s how to limit ‘Foreshadow’ attack impact
Your PC might need an update to fight ‘Foreshadow’
‘Foreshadow’ attack affects Intel chips
EECS-CSE professor Thomas Wenisch explains how Foreshadow was discovered and the implications of the security risk.
Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers swap security for speed
Spectre-like flaw undermines intel processors’ most secure element
University of Michigan professors are quoted in Wired.
Sounding the alarm on the dangers of electronic voting
EECS-CSE professor J. Alex Halderman discusses electronic voting and hacking vulnerabilities with Bloomberg News.
People are bad at spotting fake news. Can computer programs do better?
EECS-CSE professor Verónica Pérez-Rosas and colleagues studied real and fake news with the hopes of building programs that can spot it more effectively.
Drone dreams engineered into reality
AERO and EECS professor Ella Atkins discusses the benefits of U-M’s M-Air facility in North Campus.
Net Neutrality is officially dead. Here’s how the changes could affect you, according to experts
Florian Schaub, assistant EECS professor, is quoted.
From accident prevention to bike parking, Ann Arbor’s 100 mobility companies cover plenty of ground
Read about the Jason Corso’s company Voxel51, Ed Olson’s company May Mobility, alumnus Ansgar Strother’s company Movatic, and many more.
Our democracy is broken. Why can’t technology fix it?
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, proved that voting software was vulnerable to security threats.
Duo Security: Upstarts
A company founded by two CSE alumni and headquartered in Ann Arbor recently sold for $2.35 billion. (Yes, billion.) What did they do right?
Self-driving car industry confronts trust issues after Uber crash
Matthew Johnson-Roberson, assistant EECS professor, is quoted.
The self-driving Uber in fatal crash didn’t have a vision problem
Matthew Johnson-Roberson, assistant EECS professor, is quoted.
How May Mobility is spearheading autonomous driving in the form of shuttle services
Edwin Olson, associate EECS professor, is the CEO of May Mobility.
Study: Malfunctioning surveillance gear, not sonic weapons, could explain Cuba embassy ‘attack’
Kevin Fu, EECS assistant professor, believes that the sounds could have been caused by improperly placed Cuban spy gear.
UM prof floats new Cuban sonic attack theory
Kevin Fu, EECS assistant professor, does research on the use of ultrasonic waves to interfere with computer devices.
BMW, Toyota back a driverless startup that wants to start small
Edwin Olson, associate EECS professor, is the CEO of May Mobility.
BMW and Toyota are investing in a start-up that makes self-driving shuttles
Edwin Olson, EECS associate professor, is May Mobility’s founder and CEO.
How artificial intelligence is going to affect the financial industry in 2018
Jason Mars, assistant EECS professor and CEO of Clinc, has developed a conversational AI platform for financial institutions.
Pacemakers, defibrillators are potentially hackable
Kevin Fu, Associate EECS professor, is quoted.
SRC’s new R&D centers
The new $32 million center will develop new ideas in computing frontiers, such as autonomous control, robotics and machine-learning. Semiconductor Engineering reports.
Could algorithmic accelerators spur a hardware startup revival?
Valeria Bertacco, EECS professor, directs the ADA center. TheNextPlatform reports.
DARPA funds six centers working on computer design alternatives
Valeria Bertacco, EECS professor, leads the project. TechRepublic reports.
May Mobility steers to market with new tech licenses, plans to double workforce
Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s founder and CEO, is an associate professor of computer science and engineering.
6 months in business, autonomous vehicles on the road: Meet Ann Arbor’s May Mobility
Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s founder and CEO, is an associate professor of computer science and engineering. Benzinga reports.
May Mobility is a self-driving startup with a decade of experience
Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s founder and CEO, is an associate professor of computer science and engineering.
Bedrock to test May Mobility autonomous shuttle this week
Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s founder and CEO, is an associate professor of computer science and engineering.
May Mobility steers itself to $11.6M
Edwin Olson, May Mobility’s founder and CEO, is an associate professor of computer science and engineering. Global University Venturing reports.
Ask AI: How not to kill online conversations
Qiaozhu Mei, EECS professor, and colleagues trained a machine-learning program on about 63,000 Reddit threads to learn what dialog-ending responses look like.
U of M team developing ‘unhackable’ computer
Todd Austin, CSE professor, led the research.
How to create the unhackable computer
Todd Austin, CSE professor, led the research. Healthcare News Analytics reports.
DARPA takes chip route to ‘unhackable’ computers
Todd Austin, CSE professor, led the research.
A new type of computer could render many software hacks obsolete
Todd Austin, CSE professor, led the research.
US military backs project to create unhackable ‘Morpheus’ computer that can thwart hackers ‘like a Rubik’s cube’
Todd Austin, CSE professor, led the research.
DARPA backs development of “unhackable” Morpheus computer system
Todd Austin, EECS professor, lead the research. New Atlas reports.
Too late to upgrade election defenses?
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, is quoted.
Local experts weigh in on net neutrality as FCC considers new regulations
Harsha Madhyastha, EECS associate professor, is quoted.
The time to hack-proof the 2018 election is expiring — and Congress is way behind
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, is quoted.
Ann Arbor cements its status as a tech hub to watch with first unicorn
Dug Song, Michigan Engineering alum, is CEO and co-founder of Duo Security, an Ann Arbor-based startup.
VAuth tech feels your voice in your skin
Kang Shin, EECS professor, has developed a wearable device that can take the form of a necklace, ear buds or a small attachment to eyeglasses. New Atlas reports.
U-M to study flexible STEM classrooms
NSF funding will help EECS associate professor Cindy Finelli and AERO research fellow Aaron Johnson continue their research.
Phone browsing could become faster, may use less data with smart code
Harsha Madhyastha, EECS assistant professor, is one of Vroom’s developers.
Smart code helps your phone browse the web twice as quickly
U-M researchers have found a way to boost performance without security compromises.
Many county election officials still lack cybersecurity training
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, is quoted.
Why India needs a paper trail for free and fair elections
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, led a group of scientists in hacking an electronic voting machine to reveal vulnerabilities.
Our voting system is hackable by foreign powers
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, says that he and his students could have changed the results of the November election.
Professor who urged an election recount thinks Trump won, but voting integrity still concerns him
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, continues to seek data from the states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — that could help him determine if anything improper affected the election results. Story in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Clinc raises venture capital round of $6.3 million
Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang, EECS research professors, co-founded Clinc. The company whose open-source intelligent assistant and machine learning research platform is involved in research programs with Intel Corp., IBM Corp. and the National Science Foundation.
Why some apps use fake progress bars
Eytan Adar, EECS professor, describes this “benevolent deception” used by sites and apps. In a paper he published in 2013 with a pair of Microsoft researchers, Adar described a wide range of design decisions that trick their users—but end up leaving them better off.
Not the time to make voting less secure
J. Alex Halderman, EECS professor, and other computer scientists have demonstrated repeatedly that voting machines are susceptible to hacking. He has also expressed doubt in the security of elections.
How powerful AI technology can lead to unforeseen disasters
Benjamin Kuipers, EECS professor, explains that although humans typically program AI-powered robots to accomplish a particular goal, these robots will typically make decisions on their own to reach the goal.
Johnson: Michigan may boost post-election audits
Alex Halderman, EECS professor, said routine audits of the state’s paper ballots would help ensure the results are accurate and safe from hackers.
Five things that got broken at the oddest hacking event in the world
J Alex Halderman, EECS professor, and Matt Bernhard, EECS graduate student, discuss attempts to prove that the U.S. election wasn’t hacked.
Vesper grabs $15M to build a durable low-power mic that listens forever
Vesper’s technology, which emerged in part from U-M, is constantly listening, but it is doing so with an incredibly low-power draw as it seeks out the frequencies characteristic of a human voice.
U-M researchers create helpful tool for Flint residents during ongoing water crisis
University of Michigan researchers have developed a new app aimed at helping Flint residents during the ongoing water crisis in the city.
Blaming Russia to overturn the election
Exhibit A in Stein’s petition is an affidavit from Professor J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, who alleges that Russia hacked the election.
Trump allowed to join fight against Pennsylvania recount
According to an affidavit in the earlier state case filed by J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at U-M, hackers could have easily infected Pennsylvania’s voting machines with malware designed to lay dormant for weeks.
Tech advances leave society open to mass-murdering computer geeks
Dr. Kevin Fu, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, said hackers could target multiple hospitals and cause a “massive, nation-wide healthcare outage.”
GOP files federal appeal but Mich. recount continues
Alex Halderman, a computer science professor from the University of Michigan explains how a Michigan recount filed by Jill Stein’s campaign could reveal tampering with voting machines.
Russia weaponized social media in U.S. election, FireEye Says
Alex Halderman, a professor of Computer Science at U-M, said hackers could have infected Pennsylvania’s voting machines with malware designed to lay dormant for weeks, pop up on Election Day and then erase itself without a trace.
Vote recount push advances, but reversing Trump’s win is unlikely
The Stein campaign is seeking to answer the question of whether the vote was hacked by introducing malicious software into voting machines. The possibility was raised by J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at U-M.
The election probably wasn’t hacked. But Clinton should request recounts just in case.
“Were this year’s deviations from pre-election polls the results of a cyberattack? Probably not,” Halderman writes. “I believe the most likely explanation is that the polls were systematically wrong, rather than that the election was hacked.”
Alex Halderman: we will never know if the Wisconsin vote was hacked unless we check now
Alex Halderman, professor of Computer Science at UM has clarified his earlier remarks about the integrity of the Wisconsin election: in a nutshell: voting machine security sucks, hackers played an unprecedented role in this election.
Hacked or not, audit this election (And all future ones)
On Wednesday, University of Michigan computer security researcher Alex Halderman published a blog post arguing that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania should perform recounts due to risks that the election was hacked.
Trump election: Activists call for recount in battleground states
According to a CNN report, a group of scientists including J Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, has privately told the Clinton campaign it believes there was a “questionable trend”.
Want to know if the election was hacked? Look at the ballots
UM Computer Science Professor Alex Halderman: a skilled attacker’s work might leave no visible signs–though the country might be surprised when results in several close states were off from pre-election polls.
Vulnerable connected devices a matter of ‘homeland security’
“In the short term, consumers are pretty much up a creek without a paddle,” says Kevin Fu, associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Michigan.
Regulate cybersecurity or expect a disaster, experts warn Congress
“I fear for the day every hospital system is down,” Kevin Fu, who teaches computer security at the University of Michigan, told the hearing. “This will require some kind of governmental mandate.”
How you speak to Siri & Alexa matters more than you think — here’s why
“If we want the computers to behave differently, we have to actually pay attention to how we build them so we don’t just create mirrors of what society does,” says Rada Milhacea, a professor of computer science at U-M.
Evolving technologies pose challenge for medical device security
“A Brief Chronology of Medical Device Security” is the result of THaW, which is funded by the NSF. A.J. Burns, professor at UT–Tyler, and P. Honeyman, research professor of CS at U-M, collaborated on the article.
How safe is your smart home?
Atul Prakash is a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. He specializes in computer security. “I would be cautious, overall,” Prakash advises. “The technology is relatively new.
The network standard used in cars is wide open to attack
According to research presented last month at the ACM Conference, courtesy of computer scientists at U-M, the (CAN) protocol implemented by in-vehicle networks has a new and potentially quite dangerous vulnerability.
A lot of voting machines are broken across America (but it’s totally normal)
And this year is no different, as voting machines have always been vulnerable, said Matt Bernhard, computer science Ph.D. student at U-M and an expert on the security of electoral systems.
US election: Experts keep watch over ‘hack states’
“Unless the election is extraordinarily close, it is unlikely that an attack will result in the wrong candidate getting elected,” suggest Matt Bernhard and Professor J Alex Halderman, security experts from U-M.
The security challenges of online voting have not gone away
Matthew Bernhard, second-year computer science Ph.D student at U-M, and J. Alex Halderman, director of U-M’s Center for Computer Security and Society, emphasize online voting’s longstanding security challenges and setbacks.
Forget rigged polls: Internet voting is the real election threat
It was the office of Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at U-M. The hackers were graduate students, proving a point about Washington, D.C.’s fledgling voting system: that internet voting is vulnerable.
This is why we still can’t vote online
J. Alex Halderman, professor of CS at U-M, welcomed the opportunity to try to legally break into government software with his students. Within 36 hours, they found a tiny error that gave them full control of the system.
Notion raises $9.5M for a smarter email app, now live on mobile and soon, Alexa
“We have focused on building a great engineering team and also tapped the resources in our network, like U-M’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Computer Science professor Jason Mars as an advisor.”
Experts: State should audit election results
“It should be done routinely in order to provide a strong degree of confidence,” said U-M cyber-security expert Alex Halderman. “That’s an opportunity for Michigan to improve its election procedures. You should audit every election.”
Why can’t we vote online?
During the pilot, folks were invited to try and hack the system. At U-M, Professor J. Alex Halderman and his students took up the challenge. It took them about 36 hours to change votes.
University of Michigan joint institute gets $10M gift
John Wu, EECS alum, and his wife, Jane Sun, have given U-M’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute is getting a $10 million donation.