Example of some of the prompts we have for test data (Credit: Andrei Ursu)
This week the Banary team has been working hard to bring the ideas we have discussed throughout these weeks (and blog posts) to reality. As expected from the PDR presentation, we received feedback that guided us on a few more design specifications. More clarification was obtained from Liaisons on details we were in need of help with , which for they again were extremely helpful. As we will soon be presenting a project prototype, we have started working on the outline of our program. From this week progress, we have continued exploring algorithmic models for obtaining useful feedback of errors, furthermore, we have narrowed our expected performance to a clearer objective, as such we expect the program to take no more than a few minutes in analyze the data. Of course, this will all depend on the given algorithm time/accuracy tradeoff, but we expect we will find a good balance where we provide the best product to our users.
Banary team members that went in person in front of the RTX facility.
This week we have a few exciting updates! Tuesday, Banary together with The Quarks, the other RTX team this year, visited the Largo facility. We had the honor to present the PDR to a diverse group of RTX employees, which offered much advice for our benefit. Given the feedback and the team’s thoughts our presentation was effective in conveying the importance of our project, and our excitement for the future of Banary. Apart from a successful presentation, we had the opportunity to tour the facility, which the team agreed was an unforgettable experience. Seeing the important work that goes on in the largo facility has highlighted for the team that our project can have quite a big, positive impact for the mitigation of code vulnerabilities, and a more secure future. We all appreciated the effort put from all involved parties that allowed this trip to happen, both from RTX and University of Florida faculty.
PDR signature box for members, one of the many elements we have worked on for the PDR.
Banary is getting ready for a trip! With the last changes to the PDR and the PDR presentation having been made, the Banary team is making preparations for meeting with our sponsors next week. As a team we have been working hard on perfecting our expectations for the project, our possible needs from sponsors, coach, and the IPPD team and what we need to make of this a great project. One very important mission the team took this week was travel preparations, what our itinerary will look like and of course how we planned on getting to the Sponsor’s facility from Gainesville. This week’s technical progress has been quite diminished, but with such an important event coming up this is to be expected, soon we will return to progressing through our goals and reporting on these. We as a team are very happy that the travel was possible even with the effect of Hurricane Milton being still present, and by this time next week we will have an amazing experience to tell, so please stay tuned!
Two important events happened this week. We had our long anticipated PDR presentation, in preparation for the future PDR presentation, on this we as a team were pleased with our performance. Apart from minor adjustments to the presentation, as well as minor presenting tips our reviewers, both students and otherwise approved of our presentation. In preparation for it we had divided presentation slides and ran through runs to know we were property prepared and ready for our presentation. After the peer review was over, we took the feedback to heart and set on correcting some of these elements. Secondly, this week was cut short by the passing of Milton over Florida. In Gainesville the hurricane did not impact as heavily as in other areas, yet we as a team had to make sure we were prepared. Due to the RTX location we are related with being located in Largo, FL we as well wished our liaisons and sponsors good luck with the Hurricane. We will keep ourselves informed if any plans for the future site meeting have to be changed, if not we should be going to the facility in the upcoming weeks!
Photo of title page for Preliminary Design Review draft.
This week was very busy for Banary. On Monday, we met with our liaisons Randall and Jose. We had an interesting talk on some of the elements of our project and continued to try to schedule a day to visit the RTX facility in Largo, FL. After that meeting, we all met up at the IPPD Lab for Lab Safety Training. We then stayed in the lab to work on our PDR Report Draft. This report highlights our understanding of our project by showcasing a preliminary design of what it may look like, as well as the elements that went into making the decisions on how it would look like. This includes a literature review on information about Raytheon, Machine Learning, and scanning binaries. After this, we met up in class on Tuesday and had a great guest lecture, Dr. Elif Akçali. Later in the week, we worked on our Preliminary System/Product Architecture and then met with Professor Resch to give her our biweekly update on our progress. During the next few days, we’ll be preparing our PDR Presentation so that we can present it to other teams in the IPPD program. We look forward to seeing what the other teams have to present for us and delivering a great presentation of our own.
This week was a bit difficult for us at Banary. We finished our Project Roadmap and Project Risks and presented our logo to the class. Along with that, we created a mockup for what our final project would potentially look like, which our liaisons at RTX really liked (this is the image at the top of this page). The roadblocks came in the form of Career Fair and Hurricane Helene. The career fair events occurred from Monday to Wednesday and stopped us from having a full meeting with Randall and Jose. The hurricane cut power and wifi in a few of our homes, which made it hard for us to work on our PDR draft. That draft is the next objective for our team, which we’ll be working on to have ready next week. Despite these setbacks, we’re confident that with our team’s resilience, we’ll continue making strong progress on our project.
This week was a great week for us at Banary. Toward the start of the week, we presented our Product Design Specifications to our liaison, Mr. Randall Brooks, which he really liked. We then met in class where we discussed concept generation and possible ideas for our Project Roadmap, which we’ll continue to develop over the weekend. Then, on Friday, we were able to meet with the other RTX-sponsored team, Quarks. Their project on automating a testing baseline for software looks really interesting and we look forward to watching them develop this project further in the semester. Next week we look forward to begin preparing our Preliminary Design Review report so that we can one day go to Largo, Florida and present it at the RTX facility to our liaisons. Our team is motivated by the positive feedback we’ve received so far, and we’re eager to keep up the momentum. Until next week!
When the team agreed on the team name Banary (Binary Canary), I created this logo as a proposal. This was made using Canva, which made it more visually limited compared to drawing by hand or using generative AI. The design consists of circles, half circles, and rectangles.
Despite my ability limitations, I tried to include several hidden meanings to the design elements. The color scheme is primarily black and white in parallel to the idea of binary, with the yellow to provide a visual contrast and make the bird more identifiable. The bird is in a cage, in reference to how canaries are kept in a coal mine. The bird, however, resembles rubber ducks, referencing their use in software debugging. Lastly, the binary numbers that make up the cage’s bars are 8 in length, representing ascii character bytes. In fact, the 6 characters spell out “BANARY”.
Hello everyone! This week was very eventful as we had many exciting developments within Team 10… or as we now call ourselves: Banary.
At the start of the week, we met with our liaisons at RTX, Mr. Randall Brooks and Mr. Jose Romero-Mariona. After some introductions, we delved deep into the concept of what our project is about and possible approaches we could take to begin learning everything we need to bring this idea to life. The ultimate goal is to develop a program that reads compiled binary code and feeds it into an AI model to decipher what software weaknesses it may have. This will help developers in RTX find any vulnerabilities their code may have, which they could patch up so that malicious users do not take advantage of them to cause harm. It was a pleasure meeting Mr. Brooks and Mr. Romero-Mariona, and we can’t wait to meet with them again soon to reveal our team name and logo to them.
Speaking of our team name and logo – we finally decided on one. After some back and forth and taking some advice from our fellow IPPD students, we have decided on Banary. Banary is a portmanteau between “binary” and “canary.” Similarly to how canaries were kept in cages in coal mines to warn miners about dangerous carbon monoxide levels, Banary will be used to inform programmers about dangerous software weaknesses in their code. The logo exemplifies this with a golden canary at it’s center, surrounded by 1s and 0s to represent the binary element, as well as a locked shield to represent both the defense company we are working with and the cybersecurity element of our project. We believe the color choice and font design also works well with the themes of our logo, as canaries are yellow and the colors yellow and black represent “caution” and “security.”
Next week, we plan on meeting again with our RTX liaisons, as well as our coach and the other RTX IPPD team. We are also going to work on our Product Design Specifications, begin doing AI research on Hugging Face, and create our “Meet This Team” page.
This week, Team 10 convened for the first time and met with our coach, Dr. Cheryl Resch. We briefed over project specifications and meeting plans for the future. Thanks to everyone’s involvement and quick response times, we are on pace to complete our tasks for this week and prepare for next week, where we will reveal our team name, charter, and roles.
