Scholars Symposium 2025: Engineering & Computer Science

Jericho: A Cyber City for Enhancing Cyber Operations Education

by David Reid (Undergraduate), Jacob Grady (Undergraduate), Logan Miller (Undergraduate), Kaicheng Ye (Undergraduate), and Seth Hamman (Faculty)

Cyber operations create effects in physical space as well as cyberspace, but most cybersecurity education exercises are confined to cyberspace. Jericho helps drive home the real impact of cyber operations and cyber-insecurity by incorporating physical space effects into cyber operations education. Jericho is a physical table-top cyber city that incorporates critical infrastructure elements. It blends a traditional cyber range experience with a physical range. Existing cyber physical ranges are rare and prohibitively expensive. Jericho is a model for how ranges can be constructed inexpensively. It uses off-the-shelf electromechanical components like motors, speakers, and light emitting diodes (LEDs) wired to a microprocessor such as Raspberry Pi Zeros. It models how missions can be created on the range by placing students in the role of cyber operators charged with the attack or defense of critical infrastructure. Students gain access to the cyber city’s network over a VPN and begin their mission in a sandboxed virtual machine environment similar to many cyber education exercises. In one mission, students find and exploit vulnerabilities as they pivot through a mock city’s cyberspace infrastructure with the goal of commandeering the city’s traffic lights. The mission is accomplished when the physical traffic lights in the miniature city change at the will of the students.

MAESTRO: Multi-Agent AI Enhancing Security, Threat Response, and Orchestration

by Gabriela Mallack (Undergraduate), Asher Antrim (Undergraduate), Adrianna Holst (Undergraduate), Carson Levenson (Undergraduate), Blake Mead (Undergraduate), Elliot Viaud-Murat (Undergraduate)

In the cybersecurity field, a significant skills gap exists between senior-level operators and novice operators. The goal of this project is to develop an Artificial Intelligence Cyber Offensive Assistant that enables novice cyber operators to perform at the level of an expert. This assistant is called Multi-Agent AI Enhancing Security, Threat Response, and Orchestration (MAESTRO). Through our research and development, we built a program integrating local or cloud-based state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) that will give accurate responses to assist a cyber operator in developing tactics. We utilize a Multi-Agent System (MAS) and Knowledge-Augmented Generation (KAG), as well as rigorous user testing, to increase confidence in our system. This research addresses ways to improve accuracy and consistency in LLM responses to confidently use artificial intelligence to scale operators in the cyber operation sector.

Project Ampharos

by Emily Wollschlager (Undergraduate), Kai Delsing (Undergraduate), Jonathan Darst (Undergraduate), Elise Ferrenberg (Undergraduate)

Real-time data processing is essential to government intelligence for producing actionable insights and alerting engineers to critical, time-sensitive errors. The Air Force Institute of Technology’s Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center’s current data processing solution takes months, wasting valuable time in the decision-making process. Project Ampharos is a government-developed Graphical User Interface (GUI) designed to solve this problem. Project Ampharos ingests and plots data – specifically from satellite navigation technology – using a series of complex signal processing algorithms. Once the data is appropriately transformed, the project’s underlying architecture distributes data to the power spectral density (PSD), spectrogram, and raw data plots within the user's customizable dashboard. The PSD plot displays the signal as decibels (dB) with respect to frequency and allows the plot or calculations to be customized by changing the resolution bandwidth, windowing function, and other plot viewing features. The spectrogram augments the PSD plot by displaying the variance in dB magnitude with respect to time across different frequencies. The raw data plot enables engineers to preview inbound data values before any data manipulation occurs, confirming the accurate operation of their collection tools. Project Ampharos is also designed for trivial integration with diverse applications through a library schema. The Ampharos architecture conceals the intricate backend from the user, facilitating seamless integration of custom data through the GUI. This portable, modular tool provides engineers with actionable insights to ensure reliability and integrity of data collection for the ANT Center’s signal processing workflow.

LibraryLend

by Christian Eppich (Undergraduate), Zach Benjamin (Undergraduate), Thor Peterson (Undergraduate)

Physical libraries around the world are left in a less effective state due to lack of awareness of the availability of these resources. Church members, co-ops members, and even friends purchase books. Throughout the past 6 months the team has built from the ground up a web application to solve some of these issues. Our database and hosting infrastructure was built on Microsoft Azure. Our backend was built on python, and our frontend was built with a react framework guided by bootstrap. The result was Library Lend, a web application that allows users to create digital representations of the libraries, share these libraries with others, and connect with others to browse their libraries.

ShompOS: Experimentation with Operating Systems Development

by Jacob Bender (Undergraduate), Weston Tracy (Undergraduate), Miles Rupp (Undergraduate), Fenny Fenneran (Undergraduate)

The operating system is the program running at the lowest level on a computer. Modern operating systems like Windows, MacOS, and Linux are complex, and it’s difficult to grasp how each component interacts with one another. This project seeks to build an operating system from the ground up, creating several core components from scratch. Over the course of two semesters, foundational functionality was identified and implemented in an accessible way. In its final product, users can interact with several of the features and explore how each one is concretely implemented.

Design and Testing of Additively Manufactured Parts

by Isaac Koch (Undergraduate), Chris Olsen (Undergraduate), Andreas Chaffey (Undergraduate), Noah Grooms (Undergraduate), & Dr. Luke Fredette (Faculty)

Additive manufacturing technologies have developed substantially in the last decade. More resilient materials, more advanced capabilities in precision and printable geometries, and more economical mechanisms have all been introduced to the market at the industrial scale, for hobbyists, and everywhere in between. The advent of 3D printing has not and likely will not replace traditional manufacturing, but it does complement traditional methods by facilitating the manufacture of complex parts that would be impossible or too expensive to produce otherwise. Given the availability of 3D print technology, new design options become available. New methods and rules of thumb should be developed to make the most of these technologies, to extend but also integrate additively manufactured parts into assembly designs with traditionally manufactured parts as well. This project has explored several design opportunities opened by additive manufacturing technology. In particular, bound metal deposition (BMD) technology is explored to leverage printers typically used for plastics to fabricate complex parts in stainless steel and multi-material parts with either plastics or stainless steel alloys. Extensive material-level testing provides insight into material properties for cured photopolymer resin, facilitating an optimal design study on a wing section airframe, maximizing the strength-to-weight ratio of the structure. The high geometric resolution of resin prints makes possible the fabrication of acoustical materials through printing triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) mathematically designed in Matlab. An impedance tube has been designed and built to test the absorption coefficients for several geometries. Each thrust of the project develops design capabilities unique to additive manufacturing technologies, hopefully leading to further development and testing in future work.

Trails of Graville

by Matthew Carter (Undergraduate), Michael Dabney (Undergraduate), Isaac Drury (Undergraduate), and Daniel Gray (Undergraduate), Joshua McKinniss (Undergraduate), Joel Ward (Undergraduate)

A mobile game design for a casual audience created as a computer science senior capstone project. The game is a light-hearted adventure game with an overarching theme inspired by 1 Thessalonians 5:11. The game takes place centered around the titular small fantasy village of Graville. When an ordinary day turns into something quite a bit more than ordinary, the hero and their friends must go on a perilous adventure to prepare to defeat a coming evil that threatens to destroy the quiet town. This game was created using Unity over the course of around seven months.

FUSION

by Ashlyn DeVries (Undergraduate), Hannah Vangeest (Undergraduate), Nora Hagan (Undergraduate), Caleb Doese (Undergraduate)

Missionaries often lack the time, technological skills, and/or desire to create engaging content for their newsletter emails; yet, these communications are critical for maintaining enduring relationships with their supporters. The proposed solution is a mobile-friendly web application that transforms raw photos and unedited text into visually appealing content, which seamlessly integrates with platforms like Mailchimp—a popular email marketing and automation service. Our web application, FUSION (Forming Unique, Supportive, Integrative Outreach Newsletters), is designed to address this challenge. It leverages AI, like Gemini and Cloudinary, to enhance text and photos, respectively. It enables users to save and edit drafts, customize the theme and layout of their newsletters, as well as download their newsletter—an alternative to Mailchimp—and create social media posts from select content.

Speculo - Internet Resource Replicator

by Micah Vranyes (Undergraduate), Alex Steele (Undergraduate), Gable Levenson (Undergraduate), Joshua Curry (Undergraduate)

Speculo is a tool designed to aid the development of software in an air gapped environment. The tool consists of two main parts: the first to pull the required data on an internet accessible network and the second to distribute the obtained data to endpoints on the air gapped network. The transfer of data between the two networks depends on the specific deployment environment of the tool and is accomplished by the administrator. Speculo can then host these files in an s3 bucket or locally, distributing them as needed to the end user. The project is sponsored by Cryptic Vector in collaboration with Cedarville University.

CyberWeb

by Anna Kauffmann (Undergraduate), Stephen Pearson (Undergraduate), Ethan Hunter (Undergraduate), Ariella Vanderlaan (Undergraduate)

In the modern era of technology, churches interact with the internet in many ways. They may utilize desktops for their full-time staff, public WiFi for members and guests, online giving, a website for their church, or other ways. All of these have the potential to be taken advantage of by cybercriminals looking to cause harm. Many churches are either not equipped with the technical skills to defend against these criminals or do not want to spend all their budget on enterprise cybersecurity solutions. CyberWeb provides a solution: fractional cybersecurity services for organizations with limited resources, allowing clients to focus on their mission without being burdened by securing their digital assets. CyberWeb accomplishes this through a few main services: network protection, content filtering, and security awareness training. Network protection detects and blocks bad traffic. If a computer is compromised, CyberWeb can block the exfiltration of sensitive data, preventing unauthorized network use. Content filtering allows the organization to control what is being accessed on their network. CyberWeb will block bad websites in several categories, including advertisements, pornography, or other websites specified by the organization. In addition, it can enable SafeSearch on platforms such as Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and YouTube. CyberWeb facilitates network protection and content filtering through a device installed on the organizational network. CyberWeb monitors this device to receive alerts of any suspicious activity. CyberWeb monitors the firewall to ensure it is up-to-date and able to address any cyber threats. Security awareness training equips individual members of an organization. People are the last line of defense against cybercrime and must be equipped. CyberWeb seeks to teach clients the importance of good security practices and encourage them to take proper action. Network protection, content filtering, and security awareness training foster a healthy online environment that more closely aligns with the values of an organization. By addressing a client's unique cybersecurity needs, CyberWeb empowers them to focus on their core purpose. An organization's online presence does not have to be a mystery; they can have security unlocked.

King's Kids Route Tracker

by Jacob Martin (Undergraduate), Trent Enos (Undergraduate), Manuel Gaddala (Undergraduate), Seth Burkey (Undergraduate)

King’s Kids is an organization extending from the Global Outreach department at Cedarville University. This organization further works under the external organization No Longer Strangers, a refugee ministry focused on assisting individuals who enter the country and have outlasted the 3 month period that the federal government allots to assisting those families itself. Every week during the school year, college students who are a part of the King’s Kids organization drive out to Dayton, pick up the kids through individual bus routes, bring them to the church for the event, and drive them back. Currently, all data, legal and routing, is kept track of through word of mouth and a series of emails, text messages, and papers.

The Route Tracker we developed aims to fix this informality of information-tracking by digitizing the data and centralizing the bus routes. We will do this by storing important events and legal data behind a secure database managed by Cedarville University. The application we develop will allow the student director of King’s Kids to prepare routes for the bus drivers, interchange them through different weeks, and keep track of attendance. The drivers, instead of carefully looking at the routes they were assigned before leaving, are able to open the application and read where their next location is. Once they arrive and picking the children up, the drivers mark their attendance and continue to the next location. This allows the director and the drivers to streamline and better organize the event for minimal confusion.

Paychex Meeting Cost Analysis Tool

by Clement Vaud-Murat (Undergraduate), Elijah Solokha (Undergraduate), & George Prudhomme (Undergraduate)

Every year, about 37 billion US dollars are wasted on unproductive meetings nationwide. We are creating a web application that analyzes cost of meetings for our client, Paychex. The application includes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of meetings, based on predefined metrics and wage estimates of attendees using Webex APIs.