Thursday, July 24, 2025
Location: Zoom (Email codeplus@duke.edu for the invitation)
Each team will present for 20 minutes, with 5-minute transition breaks between sessions.
Morning Session | 9:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Advancing Cybersecurity Through Innovation and Solutions
Strengthening Security with Cutting-Edge Technology and Creative Defenses
9:00 AM — Honeypots for Enhanced Cybersecurity. Design a fully automated system to generate custom honeypots by retrieving common vulnerabilities and exposure data and prompting a fine-tuned LLM to inject contextually accurate code into modular honeypot templates.
9:25 AM — Enhancing Network Security with MISTRAL. Develop a retrieval-augmented large language model interface for cybersecurity analysts to query and correlate MISTRAL flow data with honeypot activity, leveraging vector embeddings and graph-based relationship modeling.
9:50 AM — Blocklist & Safelist Management Interface. Develop an intuitive, web-based frontend for Apiary, a security platform managing cybersecurity threat intelligence. The system streamlines tasks like entry management, log visualization, and routine security operations. Designed collaboratively with cybersecurity engineers at Duke OIT, the interface has potential for open-source release.
10:15 AM — Modernizing Black Hole Routing. Reengineer Duke’s legacy Black Hole Routing (BHR) tool as a containerized web-based application for real-time IP-based traffic mitigation using dynamic blacklists and safelists, integrating with SDN infrastructure. Has open-source potential.
10:40 AM — Machine Learning for Security Operations. Our project aims to build a robust API that ingests, parses, and enriches cybersecurity threat logs from Duke’s infrastructure; to clarify alerts enabling Security Operations to interpret and manage them more accurately and efficiently.
11:05 AM — Gamifying Cybersecurity Awareness. Create an interactive cybersecurity education platform leveraging gamified simulations to teach students key cyber hygiene behaviors such as phishing detection, password entropy, MFA, and social engineering response.
Afternoon Session | 1:00 PM - 3:30 PM
ACADEMIC & RESEARCH SOLUTIONs
Innovative Use of Technology to Support Learning, Discovery, and Research
1:00 PM — Advancing Vaccine Research Through Sequence Analysis. This project assists in vaccine development by creating web-based tools that help scientists analyze B cell evolution lineage trees to identify paths with low probability mutations. Low probability mutations can be bottlenecks to B cells developing higher antigen affinity to more effectively target pathogens. B cell lineage tree visualization tools assist researchers in vaccine design for immune response to diseases like HIV, influenza, and COVID-19.
1:25 PM — Unlocking Insights & Visualizing Proteomics Data. The team built a user-friendly web site to allow researchers to explore and visualize complex proteomics data (information about proteins in biological samples). The proteomics analysis tools can be used to identify correlations with medical conditions without requiring researchers to write code. When a researcher identifies an interesting analysis, the site can generate high-quality charts and figures for publication and working R code for further investigation.
1:50 PM — AsteXT: Exploring Asian American Literature Through Technology. Students developed a digital platform that brings together 50 years of Asian American short stories in a searchable, interactive format. The tool helps readers and researchers explore themes, patterns, and language trends in literature without needing technical expertise.
Innovative Tools & Digital Solutions
Harnessing Technology to Drive Impact and Streamline Operations
2:15 PM — AI-Powered Tools for Adaptive User Interfaces. Inspired by the work of Howard Pyle, this team designed and built an AI-powered tool that dynamically adapts web components and frontend UI according to an individual user’s specific needs and circumstances. The team incorporated prototypes of computer vision, voice control, gesture control, and an AI-powered backend engine to reshape the frontend interaction experience.
2:40 PM — Philanthropy Intelligence: Connecting Research & Donors. This project leverages artificial intelligence to identify and map connections between Duke University alumni and potential donors. The AI analyzes publicly available relational data to uncover links, such as shared affiliations, common networks, or shared board memberships. In addition, the web application will help the university better align its fundraising efforts with the research areas and priorities that donors care most about.
3:05 PM — Developing a Duke Co-Curricular AI Chatbot. Students are building an AI-powered chatbot to help peers discover co-curricular opportunities at Duke, such as clubs, events, workshops, and internships. The tool integrates multiple campus data sources and provides personalized, conversational guidance for exploring non-academic life.