A team of UA Little Rock students is trying to promote a safer work environment with the introduction of "Leap into Safety," an affordable virtual reality safety simulator designed to make the operators more adept at operating powered equipment safely. The team includes Trenton Burroughs, information science major, and Denver Ellis, computer science major, as well as web design students Ryan Hood and Sunny Singh. For their efforts, the students won first place in the Best Hardware Hack category at theCrimsonHacks competition March 23-24 at the University of Alabama. Each team member won an Elegoo Super Starter Kit, which includes Arduinos, sensors, motors, and other fun programmable hardware.

A team of students from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Business have placed third in the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Research Challenge on Feb. 23 at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. The students include Noah Asher, senior finance and economics major; Rita Chowdhury, Master of Business Administration student; and Alex Howell, senior finance major. Dr. Ashvin Vibhakar, Joe T. Ford Chair of Finance, served as the team's faculty advisor while Ben Bienvenu of Stephens, Inc. was their mentor. "The competition is sponsored by the CFA Institute with the goal of teaching students the practical side of equity research as well as understanding ethical principles," Vibhakar said. "The students learn institutional equities research. In the challenge, the students do exactly what a research analyst at Stephens would do."

Three University of Arkansas at Little Rock students took second place at the annual Beta Alpha Psi regional meeting in Dallas on Feb. 23. Senior accounting major James Hubbard from Wabbaseka, junior business major Shibani Lal from Little Rock, and senior accounting major Joseph Griffith from Benton competed in the conference's "Best Practices" competition, during which they presented about UA Little Rock's "Reality Fair" financial literacy workshop.

A team of business students from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock have won second place and a $3,000 prize at the international Ivey Business Plan Competition held Jan. 25-27 in Ontario, Canada, for their business plan for a device designed to help interventional cardiologists perform minimally invasive heart surgery with greater safety and efficiency. The team is comprised of UA Little Rock students Noah Asher, senior finance and economics major, Abigail Resendiz, senior international business and management major, and Zach Cochran, senior economics major. The group collaborated with Arkansas Cardiology Interventional Cardiologist Dr. Dwight Chrisman and Baptist Health Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit Nurse Anna Helm to commercialize a medical device invented by Chrisman. The device, the "Speed-Torque," is a medical torque device used by surgeons in minimally invasive heart surgery, also known as interventional cardiology procedures.

University of Arkansas at Little Rock students competed in 3MT on Nov. 7. The competition for doctoral students, which is branded by the University of Queensland in Australia, challenges students to summarize and present their doctoral research in a short, three-minute "elevator speech." Competitions have been held at colleges and universities around the world. Winners receive scholarship awards, with cash values of $400 for first place, $300 for runner-up, and $200 for the people's choice award, awarded by audience vote. This year's competition was won by Ali Abdulhussein, with Diamond McGehee as the runner-up and Brian Keltch being awarded the people's choice award. Other students who participated were Sudha Shanmugam, Evan Xiaowei Liu, Wei Dai, Ujwani Nukala, and Dileen Abdulqader.

Three University of Arkansas at Little Rock student journalists were recognized for their outstanding work with Diamond Journalism Awards, a regional competition sponsored by the Arkansas Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The awards, which were presented Oct. 25 at Little Rock's Flying Saucer, recognize outstanding journalism by professionals and students from Arkansas and bordering media markets in Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. The awards honor work published or broadcast between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2018.

New research at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock digs into assumptions about the influence of bots on people's opinions. Some people often assume that disinformation campaigns carried out on social media by bots (a computer program that can automate social media messaging and content engagement) were highly effective in changing people's opinions through repetition tactics. However, Zachary Stine, a UA Little Rock doctoral student in computer and information science, tested this theory through an experiment to determine how easily a group of artificial agents could be influenced under three computation models. Artificial agents are simulated objects in a computer program that represent simplified versions of things, people in this case, in the real world.

University of Arkansas at Little Rock student teams took two of the nine final spots at the UA BlockChain Hackathon at the University of Arkansas held Sept. 28-29. The hackathon featured 21 teams from Arkansas colleges and universities and was sponsored by nine large businesses such as IBM, Tyson, Heifer International, and J.B. Hunt, who provided challenges focused on using BlockChain technology for teams to present during the competition. Each of the nine sponsors chose a team to advance to the finals where they presented their results against the winners of other challenges.

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock students were selected as finalists for a national legal writing competition held by the Academy for Legal Studies in Business. As finalists, Maddie Burke, junior international studies major, and Ian Wren, senior economics major, presented their papers at the academy's national conference Aug. 11-14 in Portland, Oregon.

Eight University of Arkansas at Little Rock students who won a Black History Month essay contest took a free trip to explore African-American history in New York City. Dr. John Kirk, director of the UA Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity, led the trip July 9-16 in New York City.

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock students finished in the Top 10 in a national social media challenge for Phi Beta Lambda, the college division of Future Business Leaders of America.

UA Little Rock business students were semifinalists in an international marketing competition that drew 270 teams from around the globe.

Several University of Arkansas at Little Rock students from the School of Social Work were honored at the National Association of Social Workers Arkansas Annual Conference.

Four University of Arkansas at Little Rock Department of Music students advanced to the semi-finals during the 2018 spring conference of the National Association of Teachers of Singing on February 23-24 at the University of Central Arkansas.

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Social Sciences and Communication awarded six student research prizes during the college's Research and Creative Works Showcase on Feb. 27.

Twenty University of Arkansas at Little Rock students attended the Bilateral Model Arab League conference Feb. 16-18 at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock students brought home the prize for the Best Delegation in Political Affairs at the Bilateral Model Arab League conference Feb. 16-18 at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

Amie Alexander, a student at the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service and at the UA Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law, has been named to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' Next Generation Delegation for the Global Food Security Symposium, set for March 21-22 in Washington D.C.

Seventy-nine University of Arkansas at Little Rock students were selected as inaugural recipients of the Undergraduate Research Signature Experience Awards for spring 2018.

A University of Arkansas at Little Rock student was chosen as a finalist in the 2017 Diamond Journalism Awards, a regional competition sponsored by the Arkansas Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The awards recognize outstanding journalism by professionals and students from Arkansas and bordering media markets in Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Two University of Arkansas at Little Rock students have a chance to win the title of Construction Intern of the Year and a $10,000 scholarship after earning two spots for students who garnered the most online votes for the scholarship competition. The Construction Intern Awards scholarship program is designed to recognize the strongest construction interns in the industry and the companies with the best construction internship programs in the country. They are awarding a total of $50,000 in scholarships.

A cyber security team from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was one of the top finishers in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Southwest regional March 17-19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Future math and science teachers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock participated in the first VEX University robotics team in Arkansas.

Two high school students will attend the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles thanks to financial support from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock College of Engineering and Information Technology.

A cybersecurity team from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has advanced to the second round of the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. Twenty teams from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico competed during a virtual qualifying round on Feb. 18. The UA Little Rock team and squads from seven other universities will advance to compete in the Southwest regional March 17-19 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

A team of University of Arkansas at Little Rock students took third place at an international organization's construction competition.

Six University of Arkansas at Little Rock students presented research at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Feb. 25-28 in Washington, D.C.