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UCF to Grow Next Generation of Digital Twin Researchers with New Graduate Program

School of Modeling, Simulation and Training — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 14:50:27 +0000

A new UCF graduate certificate program will focus on strengthening the university’s talent pipeline to the rapidly growing digital twin industry in Central Florida and beyond.

�ճ�� received a $1.155 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish and launch the new program, which is expected to start in Spring or Fall of 2025. The grant, part of the Department of Education (DOE) Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, or FIPSE, program, started this month. SMST faculty will spend this year developing the new program and the next two years implementing and evaluating it.

The grant will enable UCF to build on its academic and research strengths in digital twins, which are digital replicas of complex real-world systems. By manipulating digital twins, scientists, doctors, urban planners, and others can analyze, predict, optimize, and make real-time decisions on products, processes, and systems.

The new DOE grant will allow UCF to expand educational programs focused on digital twin. Graduate students enrolled in the program would learn about designing, implementing, managing, and creating innovations for digital twin technologies, and they would gain real-life experiences through industry as part of the program.

Along with the $1.155 million in FIPSE funding, UCF will include about 25% in matching funds to bring the total grant to almost $1.5 million.

Ghaith Rabadi, modeling and simulation professor and graduate program director, will lead the certificate program along with SMST faculty members Roger Azevedo, Joe Kider, Sean Mondesire, Soheil Sabri and Bulent Soykan.

“The award further strengthens the digital twin strategic initiative program at UCF and ensures a definitive pathway to educate the next generation in this transformative technology,” says Rabadi. “Graduates will be well-prepared to become leading researchers and innovators in a field rapidly becoming a vital part of our regional and state economies.”

The initiative is crosscutting within the university and will encompass ongoing digital twin research in multiple sectors, including microelectronics, space, multi-domain operations, test, and evaluation, human digital twins, AI-enabled capabilities and machine interface, airports of the future, smart cities, energy infrastructure, and more.

This is UCF’s second federal grant connected with digital twin research. As part of a 2022 Department of Commerce grant awarded to Osceola County and several partners, UCF researchers are replicating the semiconductor production line at the Center for NeoVation in Osceola County, with a goal of increasing productivity and reliability.

Digital twin research is also a focus of UCF’s Strategic Investment Program. Led by Grace Bochenek ’98PhD, director of SMST, that collaboration also includes faculty from engineering and computer science, psychology, and arts and humanities. The goal is to develop a digital twin framework and tools that can be adapted by governments, industry, and academia based on their needs. Potential applications include healthcare, smart cities, transportation and defense.

UCF Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship Drives Excellence, Provides Aid

Mila Chial ’23 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:22:47 +0000

As the cost of living has risen dramatically over the past several years, financial assistance has become a vital component of student success. There is no doubt that completing a dissertation is a challenging task, but the financial demands of obtaining a doctoral degree should not stand in the way.

UCF aids students in completing their doctoral degrees and obtaining their goals by providing monetary support to assist them in their research endeavors. Support such as this allows students to streamline their focus and drives their research to be cutting-edge, which has helped make UCF No. 20 in innovation in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report.

The College of Graduate Studies supports doctoral students with the UCF . The fellowship aims to increase dissertation completion among Ph.D. students by providing a stipend of $10,000 for spring semesters, tuition support and health insurance. The award is for doctoral students in their final semester of graduate education and who have a realistic expectation of degree completion in the spring, allowing them to forgo their non-research-related employment obligations to concentrate on completing their dissertation.

The Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship recipients for the Spring 2023 semester are:

Fatema Ahmed ’14 ’17MHA
Ariege Bizanti ’16 ’18MS ’21MS
Sarah Burrows
Paula Campesino ’18 ’20MS
Sharmistha Chakrabarti ’18PhD
Devin Cowan ’15 ’16MS
Daryn Dever ’17 ’20MA
Lauren Doocy
Rebecca Entress
Md Faqrul Hasan ’19MS
En-Lin Hsiang
Jiheng Huang
Linh Le
Nicholas Leahy
Bingna Lin
Kathleen McIntyre
Abigail Moreshead ’11 ’17MA
Mrudul Nilangekar
Alexandria Orozco
Zackary Parsons
Justine Renziehausen ’19MS
Chinmay Shirpurkar ’21MS
Megan Wiedbusch ’20MA

Applications are due to the College of Graduate Studies by Nov. 15, and students should speak with their program director about the deadline to submit to their dean’s office for nomination consideration. Each college can nominate students based on their demonstrated ability to complete high-quality dissertation research under the assurance that the awarding of the fellowship will allow the students to complete their dissertations and graduate at the end of the term.

Daryn Dever ’17 ’20MA says receiving the award granted her the ability to prioritize her research without worrying about the cost. The modeling and simulation doctoral candidate is researching how different forms of data collection such as log files and eye tracking, can be used to understand how people learn to design new game-based learning environments.

“This fellowship has allowed me to ignore the usual financial pressures of being a graduate student in Orlando and focus on completing my dissertation and finishing the next steps in my professional career,” says Dever, who earned a bachelor’s in psychology and master’s in instructional design and technology.

In addition to alleviating financial stressors, the award is also fueling critical research and helping students produce their best work. Physics doctoral candidate and fellowship awardee Zackary Parsons is using the funds to further his goal of conserving the environment by creating new renewable energy technologies. His research uses scanning electrochemical microscopy to reveal structure-activity relationships for electrocatalytic materials, enabling the use of electricity from renewable sources to drive important chemical reactions.

The Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship allows students like Zackary Parsons to spend more time on his dissertation, therefore giving him time to reflect and spend with those he loves.

“I feel that the quality of my dissertation is significantly higher than it might have been if I had needed to divert my time elsewhere,” Parsons says. He also says he feels that the fellowship ensured that he would graduate without delays.

The fellowship has empowered Nicholas Leahy, a kinesiology doctoral candidate, to pursue work that aims to ensure all individuals have access to the benefits of physical activity. In the future he plans to continue working in a university setting and focus on exercise science and getting involved with the public health sector to ensure proper funding and planning are available to all individuals in the community.

“I have been extremely blessed and am grateful to receive this fellowship,” Leahy says. “Producing long-lasting change is not feasible unless everyone has access to the tools and knowledge; by which to do so, and I hope to aid in that journey.”

Each year, the College of Graduate Studies at UCF awards over $2 million in fellowship funding to well-deserving students in acknowledgment of their impressive past achievements and anticipation of future successes at the university and beyond. Students may receive fellowships from the UCF College of Graduate Studies, their college or department, or agencies or organizations outside of UCF.

Graduate fellowship funds are awarded to enhance a fellow’s scholarly and educational endeavors, but there are no specific assignments associated with the award. Instead, fellows are expected to participate fully in their program and the intellectual community of the university, thereby enriching the experience of that community.

To learn more about fellowships at UCF, contact the College of Graduate Studies Fellowship Office (gradfellowship@ucf.edu or 407-823-2766) in Millican Hall 230. For more information about graduate study, visit .

The Way We Remember

Robert Stephens — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 13:36:17 +0000

Lori Walters and Joseph Kider make an interesting research team at UCF’s School of Modeling, Simulation and Training (SMST). Walters grew up under the blue skies of South Florida. Kider grew up in inner-city Philadelphia. Walters would watch I Dream of Jeannie after school. Kider played baseball with the guys. Walters teaches courses for UCF’s history department and has an admiration for technology. Kider’s a computer science expert and a SMST associate professor who appreciates history.

“I just finished a book about the history of the pixel,” Kider says proudly, before admitting, “I’m not at Lori’s level.”

They even speak different languages.

“When I work with people like Joe,” Walters says, “I have to say, ‘OK, talk to me without the deep computer terminology. I’m an historian here.’”

They exemplify the interdisciplinary spirit of SMST by using what Kider calls “a shared mental model.” Walters might describe an object as shiny while Kider will talk about its specular bidirectional reflectance distribution factor.

“The blend of disciplines is why we’re productive,” Kider says. “We’re artists, philosophers, architects, engineers, historians and computer scientists, all working on big societal applications.”

Walters says it like this: “I can go to smart people like Joe with a cool idea and ask if we can bring it to life.”

Their latest project coming to life is called MemoryScan. Once fully developed, the MemoryScan system will allow end-users to go back in time, through virtual or augmented reality, and experience locations the way they once were. It could be Sunset Strip from 50 years ago or a neighborhood from when your parents were growing up. The pilot project, which could be launched in early 2023, will be a virtual drive through Cocoa Beach, Florida, during the Space Program’s heyday from the 1950s into the mid 1970s.

“MemoryScan is as the name suggests,” says Walters. “It’s using the memories that people have of a location and preserving them as a virtual experience for future generations.”

The project has attracted internal grants from UCF and partnerships with companies like Langan Engineering. Most recently, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant that will allow MemoryScan to incorporate technology to make it a more vivid experience.

“I’m amazed at how far we’ve come in bringing history to life,” says Walters. It’s an idea that took root in her mind years ago.

Associate Research Professor Lori Walters conducting a Terrestrial Laser Scan of a building rooftop.

The Seeds of MemoryScan

Before earning a Ph.D. from Florida State, Walters studied at Florida Atlantic where she followed up a bachelor’s in U.S. history with a master’s in the same field. One assignment changed her aspirations: a research paper on anything in Florida intriguing enough to justify 25 pages. Walters remembered a drive north on A1A and seeing Cocoa Beach.

“There were still signs up from the 1960s calling it Missileland, USA,” she says. “So, I thought it would be fun to find out what the area had been like when the space program was growing there.”

Her fascination for the city’s past began. Later, ,she went back to Cocoa Beach to conduct oral histories with people who had worked at Cape Canaveral during the space race. She noticed a concrete ramp, the only remnant of the launch complex where John Glenn made history by rocketing into orbit.

“I wondered how the history might be recreated, so it wouldn’t be lost forever,” Walters says.

A thousand miles away, a high schooler in Philly was getting caught up in another world of wonder: Toy Story.

“The way they made the movie through physics and renderings had an impact on what I’m doing today,” Kider says.

What he’s doing with MemoryScan, specifically, started with a phone call from Walters in early 2021. Walters had been talking with longtime Cocoa Beach residents to preserve their memories through audio recordings and written material. One woman, Vivian Lindauer, took Walters on an unforgettable mental tour of the old Missileland.

Screenshot of Cocoa Beach Glass Bank 3D model in Unreal.

“She went into amazing detail, right down to the furniture and types of calculators that were used in the iconic Glass Bank [formally known as The First Federal Savings and Loan],” Walters says. “Then she closed her eyes and literally described motels to me as if we were driving up A1A 50 years ago. That’s when I thought, ‘This is what has always been missing from oral histories: Put people in a vehicle, drive around and record history as they describe it.”

After mentally cruising the town with Vivian, Walters met with Kider and asked if it could be done. Can we provide people with prompts and take down the memories as they travel around? Can we track not just the words, but the gestures, the vocal inflections and the long pauses at points of interest? Can we capture so much of their memory that the memory then become a virtual experience for others?

Kider said yes. He suggested using devices to track eye and hand movements, cameras, GPS and crystal-clear audio recordings.

“That’s why I like working in SMST with people who love technology,” Walters says. “They find a way.”

Preliminary version of a participant in immersive experience driving through Cocoa Beach, Florida, along A1A in virtual reality.

The Future of MemoryScan

During her quest for Cocoa Beach’s experiential history, Walters has collected plenty of mementos. Pictures, blueprints, restaurant menus, hotel logos. They’re used to prime the remembrances of people who were there in the day. The cues are crucial, but the people complete the mosaic.

“They’re the key to everything,” Walters says. “Once they’re gone, any uncaptured memories are gone with them.”

The history of Cocoa Beach and its proximity to UCF have made it an ideal test bed. But Walters and Kider stress that MemoryScan grew from idea to reality because of Vivian Lindauer. When she passed away earlier this year, they gave MemoryScan a code name: Project Vivian.

“Lori always tells me to focus on the people, not on the science,” Kider says. “The code name is a good reminder of that.”

With the funding from NEH, they’ll be able to add depth and vividness to Project Vivian. And then? Walters envisions MemoryScan being used to capture old Miami Beach. Kider imagines his kids seeing where he grew up in Philadelphia.