UCF in the News

On a video chat in early June from the International Space Station, Sunita Williams talked to a packed elementary-school gym in her Massachusetts hometown about how it feels to ride a rocket into space (like a roller coaster) and what life is like hundreds miles above the planet. “Being in space is a lot of fun,” the 58-year-old astronaut said as her hair floated loosely in a dark halo around her head. She demonstrated a few flips, sipped tropical punch from a pouch and opened up about how people pass the time in the microgravity environment of Earth’s orbit. “Sometimes we play hide-and-go-seek,” Williams told the enraptured students. At the end of the call, a student asked a seemingly innocuous question: “How many days will you be in space?” For Williams, who was four days into what was meant to be an eight-day mission, the answer should have been clear. It wasn’t: “We’re not exactly sure when we’re going to come back.” What happens next is anyone’s guess. Given the weight of past tragedies, such as the 1986 Challenger shuttle explosion that killed seven crew members and the 2003 Columbia disaster that killed seven more, insiders tell The Journal that they are glad NASA is taking its time. “They will take some embarrassment over some kind of disaster,” said Roger Handberg, a University of Central Florida professor who studies space policy.

It has been long found that Mars is cold and dead, but one can't help wonder if we can somehow make the surface of Mars more habitable for humans. In a study published in Science Advances, researchers from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Central Florida have come up with a revolutionary plan that can help toward terraforming Mars.

On a recent Thursday afternoon at a Denny's in Long Beach, Calif., a four-foot-tall robot glided toward Diane Deconnick's table. Its three tiered trays could have hauled a feast, but they were empty except for a bowl of soup and a fried chicken salad. As the machine rolled to a stop, a scrolling digital display announced, "FOOD IS HERE.""It talks!" Ms. Deconnick said. People come to restaurants to feel connected to other humans. They want to encounter people, not a chatbot, kiosk or mechanical arm. So successfully integrating robots is more than just an engineering challenge.Human emotions are decisive for restaurant employees as well, though in their case, it’s less about feeling the love than assuaging the fears. An observational study conducted in Central Florida found that if restaurant management had consulted workers before bringing in a robot, they used it more effectively. At restaurants where a robot simply appeared one day with no employee input, workers were more likely to feel frustrated. Mindy Shoss, an organizational psychology professor at the University of Central Florida who worked on the study, said that automation can make workers anxious about losing their jobs, or even their entire occupation. “Given popular discussions about tech replacing workers, it is a common concern, especially when the organization isn’t clear on why the tech is brought in.”

Central Florida public school students return to school Monday as school districts debut enhanced safety rules, open new campuses and wrestle with the ongoing bus driver shortages. Student safety is a top concern for school districts across the state, most of which also start the 2024-25 school year Aug. 12. This year, that includes an initiative to keep all campus doors locked at all times, in accordance with a new state law. “Our parents need to know,” said Orange County Sheriff John Mina, at a Friday news conference, “that our deputies have been instructed and will risk their lives for the safety of their children.” This year, parents and other visitors will need to show identification at a camera stationed outside before entering school lobbies. In Seminole, a sheriff’s office dog will randomly sniff through classrooms in search of any weapons hidden in students’ backpacks. In Lake County, the first-ever graduate of Tavares High School’s teaching academy, is returning to the district as a kindergarten teacher at Astatula Elementary School. Like similar initiatives in other Central Florida school districts, Lake’s grow-your-own program aims to help combat the ongoing teacher shortage. The program is a partnership with the University of Central Florida.

Earlier this week, Disney reported profit from its Experiences unit — which is mostly its theme parks — fell 3% this past quarter and the company warned things probably aren’t going to get much better in the near future. Disney’s chief financial officer CFO said: “Lower-income consumers are a little stressed and shaving a little bit off their time at the parks.” Meanwhile Comcast reported a 10% dip in revenue from its Universal parks. Megan Heneghan is a Disney superfan. She visits Disneyland in Southern California about three times a week with her season pass and has a podcast and Instagram account about it. She has a pretty simple test for how crowded the park is: open up the Disneyland app and see how long the wait is for the popular Indiana Jones ride. Heneghan said even her superfan spending is being pinched. “I’ll tell myself, let’s have lunch at home and then go to the park so we don’t have to spend money on Disney lunch,” she said. A Saturday Disneyland ticket will cost you almost $200, and that obviously doesn’t count airfare or hotel or that Disney lunch. “The first thing to go when you’re being hit with any kind of financial issue is going to be your travel, your leisure, your entertainment spending,” said Carissa Baker, an assistant professor of theme park management at the University of Central Florida. But Baker said it’s not just inflation causing a theme park slowdown. Some of it is just attendance returning to normal after a post-pandemic surge. Bad summer weather also hurt.

Last week I attended “Teaching and Learning With AI,” organized by the University of Central Florida and held in Orlando, Fla. I was curious to hear how academics are talking and thinking about those tools, especially given the threat many professors feel that generative AI poses to teaching and learning. Would they be enthusiastic? Skeptical? Realistic? Short answer: all of the above. This is the second year UCF has held the conference, and it has grown significantly. More than 800 people from nearly all 50 states showed up for more than 200 presentations. I was struck by the pragmatic tone many faculty members took. AI is here to stay, they said. Employers expect new hires to have an understanding of the technology. Students are both intimidated by and curious about AI. As a result, attendees said they believed they had a professional responsibility to learn how the technology works and, where appropriate, use it in their teaching. In the coming weeks I’ll explore in detail what your colleagues at other institutions are doing with AI, and share resources to help you figure out what your approach to the technology will be. In the opening session, Kevin Yee, director of UCF’s Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, called this a Promethean moment. The future is going to be some sort of combination of human intelligence plus AI. Academe has a responsibility to understand the tools, explore the ethical dimensions of their use, grasp how to apply AI, and help students and society navigate a way forward.

A former University of Central Florida rower with epilepsy who won Lithuania’s first medal at the Paris Olympics on Saturday hopes her achievement will help motivate others with the disorder. Viktorija Senkute, who attended the Florida college from 2015-18, won the bronze medal in the women’s singles class. It was also the first medal for any Baltic country at the 2024 Paris Games. “This is insane, I still feel like I’m dreaming,” Senkute said. “It’s a very big day for Lithuania, for all Baltic countries and for UCF.

Over the past three years, holograms have become a vital tool for faculty teaching future healthcare professionals at the University of Central Florida. “We use the technology to engage our students to learn more in the area of patients' lived experiences to expose students to a wide variety of patient conditions,” says Dr. Bari Hoffman, associate dean for Clinical Affairs at the College of Health Professions and Sciences at the university. This takes the form of live beaming in expert speakers or having a hologram video taken of a patient with a rare condition, which allows students to see how these conditions present in the real world. It's an experience to which previous generations of students might never have been exposed. “The gap we're trying to close is how do we really train our students to be workforce-ready and to engage at a higher level as they're just coming out and entering into these clinical careers,” Hoffman says. Hologram technology, though still rare, is increasingly being used to teach students in various STEM fields at colleges, hospitals, and other areas in which professional training might be necessary. Modern hologram technology is not a true hologram 3D projection — instead, hologram devices, some of which can sit on a desk and others that are larger than a fridge, create the illusion of 3D people and objects. A person “beamed” into a large hologram display seems as if they are really in the room, Hoffman says. This provides a much more immersive experience for students than a mere video or Zoom-style call could.

A ribbon cutting event Saturday at Boston Hill Cemetery in Oviedo marked the official completion of a road repaving project which revealed a dozen unmarked graves. A ribbon cutting event Saturday at Boston Hill Cemetery in Oviedo marked the official completion of a road repaving project which revealed a dozen unmarked graves. The cemetery, noted by Oviedo as a significant part of its Black history dating back to the 1920s, was annexed into the city in 2023 after previously being under Seminole County’s jurisdiction. The annexation was some years in the making, following a request in 2021 from Oviedo Citizens in Action, Inc. and the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church to pave the road leading into the cemetery off of Alexandria Boulevard, the city said in a news release. According to RICHES, which is billed as “an interdisciplinary digital project that partners with multiple academic units at UCF, six Florida universities, and commercial and nonprofit sectors of the community” in order to document regional history and to develop new digital tools for historians, Boston Hill Cemetery came to exist amid the area’s rising need for a place to bury African Americans, who were forbidden from being buried in the town’s cemetery. Prince Butler Boston — the son of a Georgia slave owner, Dr. Alexander Atkinson, who moved to the area in 1885 — donated some five acres of land to the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church and made funeral costs free of charge, RICHES reported.