“They need a lot of demos to learn new tasks, and people with disabilities aren’t able to provide these demos,” says Professor Aman Behal, an assistive robotics expert at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝. “If they can, they might not be the best demos for the robot to learn from.”

Behal aims to address this challenge with his new research project, Mobile Robot Manipulators for Learning and Executing Instrumental Activities of Daily Living. The project is supported through a three-year, $600,000 grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research.

Currently, mobile assistive robotics can be mounted to the side of a wheelchair or can trail behind the individual, ready to assist when needed. These devices allow users to navigate their homes or travel to places like an office or local park, offering greater flexibility than stationary fixed-base robotics.

While the dexterity of these robots allows them to assist with complex tasks like brushing hair or cutting a piece of steak, they can be difficult for the user to control or teach. Assistive robots perform tasks better over time by mimicking the user, but in these situations, the user may not be able to complete the task correctly — or at all.

Behal and his team of researchers, including Clinical Associate Professor of Physical Therapy Morris Beato, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science Edgard Maboudou, will create intelligent and mobile robotic assistants that offer easier control and a better robot-human interface.

The project’s first year will focus on research and development, while the second and third years will incorporate testing and user feedback. Initial testing  will be conducted with students, followed by studies involving adults with upper body paralysis.

“We will recruit adults between the ages of 18 and 65, bring them (into our lab) and essentially get the robots to do several tasks,” Behal says. “At the end of it, we’ll see how easy it was to interact with the robot.”

The researchers will survey the participants to find out how many times they had to tell the robot to perform a task, how long it took for the robot to complete the action, how many mistakes were made and how satisfied they were with the robot’s assistance.

The end goal is to develop smart robots that can give the user a greater degree of independence, leading to increased self-esteem and enhanced quality of life.

To complete the work, Behal is recruiting both students and adults for future studies. Undergraduate or graduate students who are interested in robotics and assistive technology can contact Behal for job opportunities. Adults in the Central Florida area who use a wheelchair and have upper extremity disabilities may email aman.behal@ucf.edu if they are interested in testing the assistive robots.

To help address this critical issue and reduce disparities, a team of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ researchers is partnering with the City of Orlando on a $2.3 million project funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

The project seeks to address the public health problem and prevent falls with the optimization of technology that is low-cost and portable.

The work will help ensure older adults can “age in place,” and supports the City Beautiful Action Plan 2022-2025, which, as one of its primary goals, prioritizes the development of affordable housing options and services to help older residents safely stay in their homes.

“As the population of our city ages and residents are living healthier, more active and longer lives, it’s important we ensure Orlando is a well-designed, livable community that promotes health and sustains economic growth, creating happier and healthier residents of all ages,” says Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer. “We are excited to work with Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ on this grant as it will play a significant part in understanding how we can improve the health and safety of our older adult population and better implement age-friendly initiatives, especially in underserved neighborhoods.”

Innovative Approach

With the new funding, , an associate professor at the College of Nursing and the project’s principal investigator, will work with an intradisciplinary team of experts to roll out a large-scale pilot in low-income, senior communities in Central Florida of an fall assessment intervention they’ve developed and tested.

“The primary goal is to prevent falls,” Thiamwong says. “With this real-world testing, we hope to be able to prove it works and is sustainable in order to scale up and prevent falls in more communities.”

The researchers’ Physio-Feedback and Exercise, or PEER, intervention program was successfully tested as part of an NIH-funded . Their work has also been published in Research in Gerontological Nursing.

The researchers showed that their intervention, which uses technology to help reduce people’s fear of falling and improve their balance, was feasible, safe, and improved balance, muscle strength and fall risk.

The technology resembles a small scale and links to a computer. It can be easily transported to rural or low-income communities to provide immediate physio-feedback.

The immediate part is important, Thiamwong says.

“Older adults trust the results more when it is immediate,” she says. “It begins a conversation and empowers them to do something about it, and with the technology able to show improvement over time, it is also encouraging.”

Perception versus Reality

For more than half of older adults, their perception of their fall risk and actual physical fall risk are not aligned, Thiamwong says.

She says a fear of falling is just as risky as poor balance as it may limit their physical activity.

To address this, the researchers’ intervention includes a fall risk appraisal matrix that categorizes participants into quadrants looking at both their fear and balance.

The objective is to bring all participants to low fear and normal balance by the end of the eight-week intervention.

The program includes cognitive reframing to reduce fear and both a group- and home-based exercise program led by a trained peer coach to improve balance.

“Social support from peers is important to build connections and hopefully continue to keep the physical activity going even after the intervention,” Thiamwong says.

Critical Collaboration

The researchers say collaboration with an interdisciplinary team is critical to address older adults falling and other healthcare challenges.

Thiamwong  began her collaborations with the one of the  project’s co-investigators, , after seeing some of his publications on aging research shortly after she joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝.

Stout, who is director of the college’s , says the collaborations have developed into a research partnership that has been very successful.

“There is a great potential for collaboration between programs and faculty expertise in different colleges at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝,” Stout says. “Interdisciplinary collaboration is important because it allows different fields to share knowledge and ideas, which can lead to new breakthroughs.”

One of the ways Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ fosters interdisciplinary collaboration is through research clusters, such as the Disability, Aging and Technology cluster that Thiamwong and project co-investigator Joon-Hyuk Park, an assistant professor in the , are a part of. The team has been successful in conducting NIH- and Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝-funded studies.

“The cluster is an excellent facilitator to promote interdisciplinary research,” Park says. “The most challenging questions we, as researchers and scientists, seek to address these days can’t be tackled from one discipline, especially when it comes to human science to understand human behavior and study instrumentations. We need expertise from various fields.”

, an assistant professor of and project co-investigator, says that many factors influence older adults’ fall risk, including physical health, socioeconomic status, as well as psychological motivations and feelings.

“In addition, if you want to launch a fall-risk intervention that involves technology, you have to consider factors like older adults’ ability to use the technology and cost effectiveness,” she says.

“It’s easy to see how problems like this require a team of experts that understand each factor and know how to conduct science across traditional disciplinary boundaries,” she says. “It’s a truly excellent team and an important problem we are trying to solve.”

Research Team

Thiamwong received her doctoral degree in nursing from Mahidol University in Thailand.

She joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2016. She’s an expert in healthy aging, fall prevention and gerontological nursing. She is leading a Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ research team in implementing preventive interventions to transform practice, especially for older adults with limited resources.

Stout received his doctorate in exercise physiology from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2012. He’s an expert in physical assessments, such as body composition, handgrip strength and physical activity in aging populations, and he has published several studies examining the relationship between psychological and physical variables and the risk of falling.

Park received his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2019. He’s an expert in engineering wearable sensors and assistive technologies. His role in the project is to apply his knowledge and experience in wearables-based physical activity monitoring and assessment.

Rui Xie is an assistant professor in the , which is in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s . He received his doctorate in statistics from the University of Georgia. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2019.  Xie is an expert in designing study designs that are appropriate for collecting data, while minimizing the risk of bias and ensuring the validity of the results, as well as data analysis and result interpretation.

“I was inspired to join this research team because I was fascinated by the multidimensional and multidomain data the team plans to collect in the project,” Xie says. “I felt that my skills and experience in data analysis and modeling could be of great value to the research.”

Lighthall received her doctorate in gerontology from the University of Southern California. She joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2015. She’s an expert in cognition and emotion across the adult lifespan, with a specific focus on age-related changes to decision processing and behavior. She is helping to determine the cognitive and motivational factors that impact older adults’ fear of falling by guiding the team’s measurement of these psychological factors.

a Beat M. and Jill L. Kahli Endowed Professor in Oncology and an associate professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝’s College of Nursing, received her doctorate in nursing from Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝. She joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ in 2005. She’s an expert in qualitative research and randomized clinical trials, aging populations, and health disparities, with experience in technology-based intervention development and testing.

“Interdisciplinary collaboration is important because one person cannot know it all or do it all,” she says. “You need the different perspectives and experiences from other disciplines to make your own work more complete and more relevant. Without the teamwork of experts from different disciplines, your work and ideas will get stale very quickly.”

The finding comes from an examination of posts labeled controversial on social news aggregation site Reddit. To perform the study, the researchers analyzed more than 47,000 posts about cybersecurity in a Reddit dataset that was collected by the Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior (SocialSim) program of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Researchers found that these posts were seen by nearly twice the number of people and traveled nearly twice as fast when compared to posts not labeled controversial. The findings were published recently in the .

Reddit is one of the most visited websites in the U.S. A post is labeled controversial by a Reddit algorithm if it receives a certain number of polarized views, or a moderator can label a post with any number of comments as controversial.

The posts analyzed in the study included topics that wouldn’t be considered traditionally controversial but were labeled as so by Reddit, such as a personal computer giveaway offer.

The research is important because it shows that disagreement may be a powerful way to get people to pay attention to messages, says study co-author Ivan Garibay, an associate professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s .

However, he advises caution to those inducing disagreement in their social media posts.

“There may be an incentive in terms of influence and audience size for a social media user to consistently include controversial and provocative topics on their posts,” Garibay says. “This benefits the person posting the messages. However, controversial comments can be divisive, which could contribute to a polarized audience and society.”

Reddit’s definition of a controversial post, which tends to depend on increasing numbers of both likes and dislikes, is different than the traditional advertiser’s definition of a controversial post, which would contain truly provocative or taboo messaging, says Yael Zemack-Rugar, an associate professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s .

“To give this idea life, you may like a recent ad for Toyota, and I may not,” Zemack-Rugar says. “This will not make it controversial. But if the ad featured Colin Kaepernick, as the Nike ad did in 2018, after he recently refused to recite the national anthem during his games, now we are talking controversial. There is an underlying tone that is much deeper and more meaningful.”

Reddit posts are also more akin to word-of-mouth communication since they are user generated and not paid advertising, she says.

The study’s findings are consistent with past research that has found that traditional controversy increases the spread of word of mouth and discussions online, especially when contributions are anonymous, as they somewhat are on Reddit, Zemack-Rugar says.

Of the more than 47,000 posts, approximately 23,000 posts were labeled controversial, and about 24,000 were noncontroversial.

The researchers found an association between controversially labeled comments and the collective attention that the audience paid to them.

For the controversial posts, there were more than 60,000 total comments, whereas for the noncontroversial posts, there were less than 25,000 total comments.

A network analysis examining the reach and speed of the posts, showed that nearly twice the number of people saw controversial content compared to noncontroversial content and that controversial content traveled nearly twice as fast.

The researchers limited posts in their analysis to those that had at least 100 comments.

Jasser Jasser, a doctoral student in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s , and the study’s lead author, says the findings highlight the need to better understand why the content labeled in Reddit as controversial spreads.

“The next step in this work is to analyze the language used to induce such controversy and why it brings the attention of the social media users,” Jasser says.

Study co-authors were Steve Scheinert, a senior solutions specialist with a professional services company and Alexander V. Mantzaris, an assistant professor in Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s .

The study was funded with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Garibay received his doctorate in computer science from Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝. He joined Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, part of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s College of Engineering and Computer Science, in 2016.

The bachelor’s in Data Science spans a variety of sub-disciplines within the greater field of data science, including mathematics, statistics, specialized programming and algorithm design. It also teaches students how to draw useful conclusions from data so businesses can make informed decisions.

The new degree becomes the third undergraduate degree offered by the Department of Statistics and Data Science, along with one in statistics and another in actuarial science. The department also offers a master’s with two tracks in data mining and statistical computing and a doctorate in big data analytics.

Students in the new degree will begin with the basic science behind data creation and extraction as a foundation, then move on to advanced topics such as machine learning, deep learning and natural-language processing. As participants build on this knowledge, department Chair Shunpu Zhang is hopeful the unique courses will challenge students as much as it allows them to think creatively.

“We’re offering students a modern degree in a field that is growing as quickly as it is evolving,” he says.

The need is rising for data analysts who can create, adapt and use state-of-the-art tools to obtain insight from large and unstructured data sets and convert them into knowledge. Business-Higher Education Forum puts the demand at 2.72 million new jobs posted in 2020 requiring data science expertise.

Multiple departments at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ developed the degree to maximize utility and versatility, including computer sciences, industrial engineering and management systems, and mathematics. Some of the available courses include computer science and data analysis praxis. The degree’s heavy emphasis on physical and computational sciences is sure to interest students searching for training in multiple disciplines, says Zhang.

“This has been highly anticipated by students,” he says. “I’ve had many students, undergraduate, doctoral…all contacting me out of curiosity and excitement.”

for the new program before the May 1 deadline.