Blog Posts

Week 27: The End

Published:April 25th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

Two semesters have passed since the formation of Team Banary. The team went through its highs and lows, periods of certainty and uncertainty, and through the effort put forward by the seven Software Engineering students that formed part of it, Banary: In the CodeMine was born. In this time the team went from being complete strangers to friends and colleagues. Our external support by our coach, liaisons, IPPD staff, and all those involved (including you, the reader) has been critical for our product development and development as professionals.

This week the Final Design Review took place at the Reitz Union. The IPPD program hosted a wonderful group of professionals to speak to the IPPD cohort and celebrated the 30th anniversary of IPPD, something the team is very proud to be part of.  The opportunity to learn more about the process of design in the field of engineering from those that have practiced their profession on it gave an opportunity for students to learn and grow, to prepare to join the workforce and be an exemplary engineer.

Banary team during FDR Credit to: Dave Schlenker and Qingyu (Grace) Yang

 Regarding the design review the team showed our final deliverables to a community of stakeholders and peers, culminating in a public showcase. It was the apex of our work, the public offered insights and questions, that reinforced how Banary was not only an interesting project for the members of the Banary team, but also to the public in general. It was a wonderful experience to meet the audience with varying degrees of knowledge about our prototype and modifying our presentation to accommodate for this. We believe that in the end, our prototype achieved its goals, demonstrated the feasibility of Artificial Intelligence as a helper tool for code analysis, showing how our tool can currently be used for this purpose, and once again how IPPD links companies, professionals, and students to achieve great things and strive for more.

 Lastly, once again thank you for reading our blog, thank you for your interest in Banary and our work, thank you for your interest in IPPD, and we hope you have found our work as important and fascinating as we have. The Banary chapter might be closing for now, but we hope the Banary: In the CodeMine tool is of great benefit to its users, and that the project will mean to all of those involved as much as it has meant to the Banary team, from all of us, thank you and have a great summer!

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Banary – Project Poster

Published:April 21st, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

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Banary – Project Video

Published:April 21st, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

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Week 26: FDR preparations & Peer Review

Published:April 18th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

Second to last blog post! The end of the semester is approaching very fast, and we at Team Banary are ready to make the best of it. This week has seen the closing of remaining project work and a strong emphasis in preparing the last touches for the Final Design Report presentation, documents, and of course the project video.

The team has been working arduously on the deliverables, sources and knowledge obtained from a school year worth of work has been steadily compiled, trying to encapsulate all that we have learned, and that can help any future teams take advantage of Banary. It has been a great opportunity to recapitulate all that the team has worked on, it has also demonstrated how much our work matters, and seeing it all come to fruition is a very rewarding experience.

This Tuesday, we also had the pleasure of presenting our FDR presentation draft to a group of our peers. The experience at this point was very familiar, yet nevertheless quite rewarding. We obtained valuable feedback from the audience, whose fresh perspectives gave team Banary a lot to think about. Elements that were removed for fear of being too much information were reintroduced, while others that were thought to be important were curtailed, overall trying to make the presentation concise and helpful in understanding what the team has done and why it matters. And on this we believe we are succeeding, as it stands the team has been working on solving the raised issues and preparing for FDR next week. We hope our peers know their feedback will help our presentation be the best it can be, and we thank them so much for it!

Excerpt of Final Design Report

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Week 25: Lights, Camera, Action!

Published:April 11th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

Many deliverables are on the way, and we hope you’ll be excited for the prototype showcase video that Banary has been working on these past weeks!

Team Banary members during one of the filming sections.

As a small break from the project and its intricate details, the team enjoyed pursuing another creative avenue, through planning, filming, and editing, we have worked on a video that should show how much we have put into the work and prototype.

Through it, we hope to show the use case of Banary, as well as a quick demo of the command line interface and how it works, all accentuated with humor, because although much can be said of the technical details of our project, is important not to forget about the bigger picture, that this project is made to facilitate developer’s work, and that it has a lot of effort and creativity by all its stakeholders placed on it.

This video provided the team with a creative avenue other than the prototype itself that allowed the expansion of our interdisciplinary skills. Our hope is that it will give a good view of our dream for the project, and how it can be used in real world scenarios, to solve real world problems. Stay tunned for this and many more deliverables produced by the team, as we approach the end of the semester and the culmination of all we at Team Banary have done.

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Week 24: Spring Prototype Inspection Day!

Published:April 4th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

This week one more milestone surpassed by team Banary. Tuesday 4/1/2025 our team together with the rest of the teams at IPPD carried our second Prototype Inspection Day presentation. This was an opportunity for team Banary to show our progress, specially since last PID. Through three presentations to groups of two audience members at a time we explained our project and prototype. We went over our general project explanation, the why and the how, as well as dove into obtained data showing our project working on prediction of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, we provided a demonstration of this by running the current Banary prototype live and showing that indeed we were receiving correct prediction of vulnerable files, surpassing the benchmark for accuracy set by the team. The audience was selected as their field of knowledge lined up with our project, and as hoped we were offered insight about the areas of our prototype that on these last few weeks we can pay extra attention with. We had a very successful PID that has given us much to think about, and now team Banary prepares for Final Design Review. Thank you to all the audience members, the IPPD team, and all facilitators that help set up and lead such a successful Prototype Inspection Day!

Team photo after completing Prototype Inspection Day!

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Week 23: Telling Our Story

Published:March 28th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

With just 4 weeks until our final design review, its time to start wrapping up the technical progress and focusing on telling our story. This week, the team completed and submitted our video concept storyboard and made plans to record and edit the video. The video focuses less on the technical implementation of the project, instead giving the viewer a sense of the real-world problem and how our product solves it. We also got started brainstorming our poster, which will serve as a one-stop source of information about our project for passersby at FDR. On a technical note, we made significant improvements to our recurrent neural network this week, including properly handling 32 vs 64 bit input and running the first successful performance test on an arbitrary test set. These advancements bring our prototype one step closer to completion. We are looking forward to our second prototype inspection day this upcoming week. In fact, this week we had the opportunity to present our plans for the event and received valuable feedback from our peers. Our main two goals for the event are to demonstrate how our product solves the problem at hand, and also to capture any final pieces of advice to implement into our project in the final few weeks of the course.

Excerpt of Early Storyboard Draft for Banary’s Promotional Video

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Week 22: Pushing Forward

Published:March 14th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

This week, there was no official lecture from the IPPD program, so the Banary team was free to dedicate extra work time to the project. We had an incredibly productive session and made progress on our upcoming presentations and deliverables, including Prototype Inspection Day 2, as well as our video pitch, project poster, and Final Design Report. Following a great brainstorming session and thanks to some skilled artists on the team, we were able to complete the first draft of our video pitch storyboard. We also made technical progress on several different aspects of the project, including working on packaging the final deliverable and continuing to organize our code repository. In fact, we even merged four separate pull requests from different members of the team, implementing features including connecting the completed predictor backend to our original front-end program, further documentation in the README, a new script for mass testing arbitrary executables, and improvements to the predictor for effective processing of very large files. We are excited to watch the remaining technical tasks melt away as we keep progressing towards the finish!

Banary team taking advantage of project work time

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Week 21: The Final Stretch

Published:March 7th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

For the first time in the course, the end is in sight! With six weeks to go, the Banary team got started outlining our last deliverable, the Final Design Report, and met with Liaison Engineers to ensure that it meets expectations. After an inspiring and enlightening guest lecture on effective storytelling from the Innovation News Center’s Harrison Hove, the team got to work brainstorming ideas for the final technical demonstration, presentation, video, and poster. All remaining technical tasks have been assigned, and the team is pushing forward to improve our prototype for its final delivery. On a technical note, a standout accomplishment is the connection of our current analysis model with the original user interface that was designed early on in the first semester. With this task completed, we now have our first working end-to-end iteration of the prototype. We are looking forward to maximizing the time we have left to improve our model as much as possible and presenting it effectively to demonstrate our accomplishments!

Current prototype with UI and model integrated together

Week 20: A Very Successful QRB2!

Published:February 28th, 2025
Category:Spring Semester

This week, Banary has concluded QRB2 with a massive success. We presented our project goals, prototype results, testing metrics, TPMs, and next steps. We demonstrated our prototype’s ability to perform what was requested by our sponsors, that is, to identify vulnerabilities in software at the binary level. We also mentioned how we plan to improve the prototype’s ability to generalize predictions and handle larger inputs. The presentation was well received by the judges, who had no negative remarks on our current progress. The team was well-prepared to answer their questions and explain our current progress. During the project work directly after the presentation, the team regrouped and identified tasks assignments for everyone, as well as extensively reorganized the repository, cleaned up files, and began the process of documenting details of every piece of the repository in preparation for the Final Design Review.

Title slide of QRB2 presentation
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