February 20, 2014
During the 2014 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in Seattle, WA master’s students Fabian A. Del Valle, Diana M. Darabi and undergraduate Lyan M. Lugo participated in the first Code-A-Thon. The focus was Cyber Security and the students were given a challenge. They were distributed into nine groups of six individuals with a mix of undergraduate, Masters and PhD students from universities across the country such as UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, West Point Military Academy and MIT. The challenge consisted of developing two different programs to encrypt and decrypt information and using socket programming to develop programs to send encrypted messages between our teams. At the same time we had to be capturing the encrypted messages of the opposing teams and try to decrypt them.