On April 12, 2024, at the Spirit of Innovation competition, two PhD students successfully presented their cybersecurity-based project and received 2nd place honors along with a cash prize of $3,000. Leslie Delval and Thomas McCullough, both Ph.D. candidates, collaborated on a project entitled, "SAVI: Skill Alignment for Vocational Intelligence." The project underwent three rounds of competition, innovation, design, and application, and were among 9 finalists in the last round to present to an audience consisting of industry CEOs and CTOs local to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

In addition, both Leslie and Thomas represent the Network Security Lab, led by Dr. Ram Dantu, CSE Professor and Director of the Center for Information and Cybersecurity. Dantu mentions, "This work was part of the PhD work in large language models in the network security lab... The judges unanimously praised the tool for its immediate groundbreaking practical applications. The team hopes to continue to fine-tune the tool to meet the needs of the industry."

The USICOC Foundation’s annual Spirit of Innovation Technology Competition and Business Plan Presentation is a program designed for current undergraduate and graduate students in North Texas to support technology innovation and entrepreneurship among our local students. The Competition encourages participation from students who can create solutions to real-life problems. The solution is expected to be technology-based and designed to solve a current problem or make an existing product better.

Read more about the U.S. India Chamber of Commerce

Read more about the Spirit of Innovation competition