Leadership Teams

Plans, goals and accomplishments

GameCATS: Gamer's Alliance / CSDT
- The goal of our group is to get more people interested in computing through gaming. We have started a club for gamers at UNC-Charlotte and through this club we plan to target our college community. As part of our Outreach we are targeting not only the college community, but intend to get local high school and middle school students involved in some of the events that we are planning for the Gamers Alliance. We are building a game to teach students programming assignments, specifically the concepts of pass by value and pass by reference.
High School Outreach
- This semester we will present the modular power point which we made last semester. We plan to use it to recruit for IT majors by demonstrating all the vogue things that we as undergraduates are able to do.
Team Hope
- -- Recruit more students into computing through middle school outreach using robotics.
  -- Raise awareness of computing through CCI marketing outreach using robotics.
  -- Develop our personal leadership skills.
  -- Enhance our technical skills
Research Experience for Undergraduates
- The following is the list of current research projects:
- Avari
  Currently, we are working on Avari (Animated Virtual Agent Retrieving Information), a virtual character who answers questions about computer science faculty at UNC Charlotte.
- Avari
  Previous research shows that the use of virtual humans can be effective in many applications including social conversation, training, and provision of information. Currently, however, the use of virtual humans is limited, with most applications used only within the labs they are developed in. Studies of this kind of use provide us with little information about how people in general would interact with virtual humans, and how helpful they will be when people come to them without any expectations defined by previous experience. To remedy this discrepancy, we present Avari (Animated Virtual Agent Retrieving Information), a virtual agent capable of interacting with anyone who approaches her and ready to be deployed in any location with sufficient lighting and a power outlet. Avari uses computer vision to detect when someone is standing in front of her, and then uses a speech interface to answer questions about the computer science faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Avari gathers data on user interactions. We plan to place her outside of an undergraduate computer lab in the computer science building at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and to analyze the data to find trends in how people interact with her.
- DNS Vulnerabilities
  We are researching the problems and vulnerabilities associated with the Domain Name System responsible for turning domain names into IP addresses. Specifically, two subjects are being considered. The first is the botnet related threat known as a fast-flux network. Fast-flux networks occur when botnets are created with the purpose of hiding a back end server containing actual web content. These zombie machines act either as proxies or as domain name servers. Proxies forward requests to the back end server and web pages from the back end server to hide its identity. The domain name servers maintain the mapping between domain names and the IP addresses of the proxies. The whole scheme is meant to allow the bot master to host illegal or malicious content with little worry of being prosecuted or shut down. The second subject being investigated is a larger group project that arose out of the first. It is a survey of the possibility of creating a domain name server reputation system similar to IP reputation systems already in place. The idea here is that IP addresses can be voted on to verify that they are trust worthy, but nothing of this sort has been done for the name servers which point you to a given domain. This leaves the entire system open to exploits such as cache poisoning and fast-flux networks. DNSSEC is a proposed standard to combat some of this behavior, but it is not yet widely accepted and may not be a full answer to the problem.