UCF in the News

AI is accelerating productivity across nearly every industry. Code is written faster. Decisions surface sooner. Work moves at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Alongside those gains, a quieter risk is emerging: the underuse of core human cognitive skills. A recent World Economic Forum report identified creative skills like critical thinking, judgment and problem-solving skills as both increasingly important and increasingly difficult to find at scale. Research from the MIT Media Lab has also found that using AI can lead to "cognitive atrophy," where reliance on intelligent systems can reduce independent reasoning and decision making over time. Theory-based learning is effective for transferring information. What it struggles to do is reveal how people reason under uncertainty. A study conducted mainly by researchers from the University of Central Florida found in 2010 that traditional instruction can often fails to translate knowledge into real-world decision making, particularly in complex or dynamic environments.

Local emergency managers, the behind-the-scenes coordinators who mobilize help during disasters, have raised the same point time and again: We need adequate resources to protect people in harm’s way — before the harm arrives. In some notable cases, resources didn’t come soon enough. Claire Connolly Knox, who directs the University of Central Florida’s master’s program for emergency and crisis management, has been studying what a “decentralized FEMA” could mean for state agencies. She said it could take several legislative cycles before states are prepared to fill in the gaps that changes to FEMA might create. Many states, Knox said, are not closely tracking spending across multiple departments and multiple phases of emergency management, meaning “we don’t know the true cost” of mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters. “When you start breaking that down,” Knox said. “You start seeing that this isn’t a quick fix.”

Engineering students and faculty at the University of Central Florida are using science and technology to tackle real-world problems. As part of Engineers Week, researchers are showcasing projects focused on issues including disaster preparedness, public health, and digital security.