For the eighth time, cybersecurity students from around the world are preparing for the year's premier event--the CSAW Cybersecurity Competition at NYU-Poly. The CSAW "Capture The Flag" (CTF) competition is a contest designed to evaluate application security skills. Competitors will attack vulnerable applications and solve offensive challenges. Challenges are divided into technical categories and assigned point values based on how difficult they are. The CSAW CTF is loosely based on the widely known DEFCON Capture The Flag competition. CTF is over and the results are posted here.

Our undergraduate team finished 23rd out 207 total teams. They finished 10th among all 74 undergraduate teams. Most importantly, they finished 7th among US undergraduate teams, so they won the qualifying round and now CSAW will fly four of the team members (in November) to compete with 10 other teams on-site in New York, where the prizes include cash and scholarships to NYU-Poly. Schools we beat include MIT and University of North Carolina.

Congratulations are due to Chad Spence, Aaron Hiltgen, and Ujjwal Bhattarai who worked all summer getting STEAL-2 reconfigured, setting up the lab for the competition, collecting a vast set of tools, and organizing their schedules so that one of them was always there for the entire 48-hrs.

Congratulations are also due to the all the faculty who taught these students how to think through a very diverse set of challenges.

Most of all, congratulations to the students who organized themselves, competed, cooperated, and won the right to compete at a higher level.

A mobile application for individuals with special dietary needs, called Your Happy Plate, won first-place honors at Startup Weekend Omaha, a 54-hour cram session of brainstorming, coding and business development.

The event featured 18 teams vying to create a legitimate business out of an idea in just more than two days. Each team gave a pitch before a panel of judges selected the winner.

Your Happy Plate was brewed up by merging ideas for nutrition and food allergy applications from Francesca Cutrera, a freshman at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has celiac sprue disease, an intolerance for gluten, and Colin Roberts, director of business development at Accent Cost Containment Solutions.

Cutrera said Monday that the app would help people with food allergies like hers or people, such as diabetics, with other nutritional needs know what is in the food that they buy from grocery stores or restaurants.

While shopping, you can use the app to scan the barcodes of items, and it will tell you whether or not the items in the food correlate with your nutritional needs, Cutrera said.

For now, the application will target those with food allergies and diabetics, but eventually it will expand to help people on diets, people trying to hit nutritional goals and people with specific food preferences. (Hold the onions, please!)

The mobile app isn't available yet, but the group expects it to be downloadable on virtually all mobile platforms soon for $1.99.

The team that developed, built and pitched the business idea includes Cutrera, Roberts, Jon Burlingame, Mike Cutrera, Brian Fritzsche, Trevor Savage, Sandi Barr and Barbara Heinlein.

The team already has a number of investment leads, Cutrera said, and has an appointment to meet with ConAgra Foods Inc. about including the company's food products in the Your Happy Plate database. For more information please visit http://www.omaha.com/.

The University of Nebraska at Omaha provides a variety of quality research and creative activity opportunities for students. Students at School of Interdisciplinary Informatics showcased their research and creative activity as oral presentations, performances, exhibits and posters. Thank you and congratulations for the students, faculty and staffs who participated at UNO research fair with great effort.