Today was a great week for us at CyberSign as we got to meet Mark Sanders who is one of our liaisons from RTX! He drove up from the RTX offices in Largo, FL to give us a presentation during class. The presentation was about tips that would help engineers succeed in their future careers. It was a fantastic experience as we all learned so much about how we can be successful once we graduate, and it is knowledge that we will not take for granted. We were also able to snap a quick picture with him, as you can see above.

Another piece of great news is that we were finally able to schedule our onsite visit to the RTX offices in Largo, FL. It is now set for November 6^th where we, along with the other IPPD team that is sponsored by RTX, will be presenting our PDRs. We have continued to work on our presentation content and presentation skills following everyone’s great feedback from last week’s peer review presentation. We are all very excited, November 6^th can’t come soon enough!

We finally presented our first version of our Preliminary Design Review! Above you can see our full team right after we completed our presentation and spirits were high as we were very happy with how we did. We want to thank everyone who was present as they all were providing very useful and helpful feedback on our content as well as our presentation skills.

In addition to the presentation, this week we have submitted our first complete draft of our PDR report. These two tasks have taken up almost all of our time, but our hard work is paying off. We are waiting for feedback on that draft and for further feedback on our presentation, as we continue to improve and perfect our PDR report and presentation as we all have the onsite visit to RTX at the front of our minds. As mentioned in previous posts, we are still working on planning a date for the visit. It is becoming more and more apparent that the visit will take place in early November, and we are more excited and prepared than ever.

Saying this has been a busy week for us at CyberSign would be an understatement. We have been dedicating almost all of our time to perfecting our first complete draft of our PDR report, as well as preparing for our first peer review presentation of the PDR. Thankfully, these drafts we are working on have been coming along very well and we are very happy with the results. The concept we will be presenting is one we are confident in and cannot wait to acquire feedback on. We are both excited and nervous for the first peer review presentation that is approaching very soon.

In addition to this, we have still yet to decide on a date for the onsite visit to the RTX offices in Largo, Florida where we will present the final version of the PDR. This has added an extra layer of stress to this whole process, but we understand that this is difficult process with a large amount of moving pieces. Right now, it is looking like the visit will take place in early November, but again nothing is set in stone. Just like for our peer review presentation next week, however, we are very excited for this visit and presentation!

As you can see above, we have decided to change our logo once again. We were not able to meet with our liaison last week, so we never received feedback or approval on the logo until this week. After this feedback and other feedback from classmates, we decided to go with a “dark mode” aesthetic. We only changed the color scheme and everything else remained the same. Thank you to everyone that provided feedback!

Besides this, the main focus of our week has been to create the first rough draft of our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) report. The full PDR did not have to be complete by the end of the week, but we still wanted to provide something that we can continue working on in the coming weeks as we prepare for our on site presentation at RTX. We have continued to communicate with them to finalize a date this month for this visit and we are very excited for it!

This week was very productive for our team. After our meeting with some employees at Semgrep last week, it really helped us understand how Semgrep works and how to use it. It really opened our eyes on what we could do. This led us to be able to begin brainstorming on how we could solve the problem that Raytheon has given us the task to solve. However, we are still slightly unclear on the requirements and specifications that Raytheon wants us to focus on, as our liaisons were unable to make it to our weekly meeting. Therefore, we have not gotten our product design specifications approved yet.

As a team, we also began planning on what our next few months would look like. I (Jason) was unable to make our unofficial team meeting that was scheduled to create a roadmap for the month of October, but my team was able to finish it without me and right now we plan to present our preliminary design review in person on October 25th. We have also contacted Raytheon about this date, and other dates this week as we would like to visit during this time period. They have yet to respond with a final date, but we are optimistic about this date and are very excited to visit the offices!

As you can see above, we have improved upon and agreed on our final logo! To create this logo, we first had the idea to have a magnifying glass analyzing lines of code, since SemGrep is a static code analysis tool. We then created our first logo concept that was in last weeks post and input it into an AI image generator, since our project also requires machine learning and AI, and we chose our favorite one. Our name, CyberSign, comes from the words “Cybersecurity” and “Signatures”, which are rules that SemGrep follows to ensure code a little vulnerabilities as possible.

This week, we met our liaisons and executive sponsor for the first time! We were both excited and nervous, but it went really well. The RTX employees are just as excited to work with us as we are to work with them for the next year. They also helped clear the air on many questions we had about the scope of work and general questions on what they are expecting of us. We are definitely ready now to take on this challenge.

Welcome to the CyberSign blog. Here we will keep everyone updated on our weekly progress involving our software project, SemGrep Signatures Automation, which was provided to us by our sponsor RTX (Raytheon Technologies). Our team consists of Jason Rodriguez, Ernesto Roja, Alexander Martin, Jacob Shirey, and Ethan Graff. We will also be working under our faculty coach, Cheryl Resch, and our company liaisons to produce the best results we can this year.

This week, we all met in person for the first time and we all got along very well. We discussed how we want the following year to look, as far as how often we will meet, who will take on certain roles and tasks, etc. Next week, we have our first meeting with our company liaisons, which is really exciting. We are currently in the process of preparing what to cover and making a long list of questions to ask.