UCF in the News

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only 27% of veterans can afford to get a bachelor's degree. Organizers at Soldiers to Scholars, a volunteer program at the University of Central Florida, say they have been fighting to change that by paying for veterans' degrees in full. Five days a week for 180 days a year, veterans participating in Soldiers to Scholars walk almost 4 miles a day to make sure the kids at Eagle's Nest Elementary in Orlando make it to and from school safely. Program participant Gabriella Isaza said that walking alone can be dangerous for the children — and with busy roads, they have to be extra cautious in making sure their 2-mile walk to school goes smoothly. Isaza, a Navy veteran, said Soldiers to Scholars has helped her and her fellow veterans not only attend college but make a difference in their community as well. “We want to make sure that (the students) get safely to their homes, safely to their school,” she said.

Well-made buildings are said to have "good bones." But if a building or a bridge had broken bones, how would an inspector know? Doctors use X-rays for patients, and soon local scientists are hoping to put similar monitoring technology in the hands of engineers. Researchers at the University of Central Florida are developing virtual reality and artificial intelligence tools to better monitor the health of buildings and bridges. In 2019, the U.S. ranked 13th on the World Economic Forum for its aging infrastructure. In 2021, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave America's infrastructure a C- and called out a need for more innovative technologies to better monitor and repair the country’s buildings, bridges, and roads.

In response to the escalating demand for adept cybersecurity professionals in the U.S., the Department of Energy (DOE) has tried to foster a well-equipped energy cybersecurity workforce through a hands-on operational technology cybersecurity competition with real-world challenges. On Nov. 4, the DOE hosted the ninth edition of its CyberForce Competition. For the second year in a row a team from the University of Central Florida (UCF) won first place in the competition. The group received a score of 8,538 out of 10,000. Amanda Theel, group leader for workforce development at ARgonne National Laboratory, said the scores do vary quite significantly from the top-performing teams to lower-ranked groups. “What we’ve found is obviously teams that have returned year after year already have that—I’ll use the word expectation—of already knowing what to expect in the competition,” explained Theel. “Once they come to year two, we’ve definitely seen massive improvements with teams.”

UCF quarterback John Rhys Plumlee knew precisely what was on the line in the final home game of his college career. A win against Houston on Saturday would make the Knights bowl-eligible in their first season in the Big 12. A loss would end the season in disappointment. The 5th-year senior scored two touchdowns as UCF (6-6, 3-6 Big 12) became bowl-eligible for the eighth consecutive season, winning three of its last four games, including a 27-13 victory over the Cougars.

A Nov. 8 Facebook post (direct link, archived link) shows two photos: one of the moon illuminating a body of water and another of an astronaut standing on the moon next to the American flag. Yan Fernandez, a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida, told USA TODAY that the light reflected off the moon’s surface works much like other objects.

As more businesses in the hospitality industry consider robots as a solution to a thinned frontline service workforce, owners and operators must recognize that their investment in a service robot extends beyond the hardware and software. It may require targeted training, small architectural and design improvements to the physical space, an assessment of organizational and managerial readiness, or all of the above. Service robots can help elevate customer service if their purpose is clear, if their physical environment is conducive, and if leadership actively supports staff during the adoption process.

Even the most successful space missions initially encounter snafus which can keep their project managers up all night. And the European Space Agency's Euclid mission is no exception. Roughly one month after its launch this past July, the team realized that the spacecraft had issues. Ones that could jeopardize Euclid’s forthcoming wide-field survey to finally understand the cosmos’ unseen dark energy and dark matter. Although Euclid was not designed to study asteroids, it is expected observe more than 150,000 of them as foreground objects in its images. This will produce a gold mine of data on asteroids; we will characterize smaller and more distant asteroids than possible from ground-based telescopes, Humberto Campins, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, told me via email.

The University of Central Florida has grown its prominence in research as it prepares for its football team to play the latest iteration of the Space Game. UCF's football team will play Oklahoma State on Nov. 11, the seventh installment of the game which includes special Citronaut uniforms and promotes the school's research and more. The school's ties extend from when it was founded in 1963 to provide the workforce for activity on Florida's Space Coast, to now, where rockets from Launch Pad 39A line up with FBC Mortgage Stadium's 50-yard line.

Less ink has been spilled in the quest for the Holy Grail than a more elusive prize: the perfect Thanksgiving turkey. Every year, magazines and newspapers and websites — including, of course, The Washington Post — offer up the latest and greatest takes on the recipes and techniques that will produce for the reader willing to follow along the bronzed, juicy, flavorful centerpiece of their holiday table that they’ve been dreaming of. “There’s a saying in food media that every Thanksgiving is a cook’s first turkey,” says Kim Voss, a University of Central Florida professor who studies the history of food journalism. “But it’s another cook’s 20th — so the question is how do you balance out the need for the basics and the fact that someone has been cooking for so long, it’s like ‘give me something new.’”