Academic advising presents significant challenges in both time management and complexity. Currently, students navigate between two advising options: generic online resources and personalized consultations with professors and advisors. While personalized advisement offers tailored advice, professors cannot be expected to meet with every undergraduate in their major, especially as enrollment grows, and academic advisors may lack specialized knowledge required for some majors. Echelon addresses this gap by creating a middle ground between generic and personalized advising, offering students an effective supplement and saving time for all parties involved. Echelon functions as an intelligent chatbot assistant powered by large language models such as Llama 3 and Mistral. Upon signup, students share their academic records, enabling Echelon to create individualized profiles that consider key factors such as major/minor selection and performance in critical courses. The project is being built using TypeScript and Rust with Svelte and Axum frameworks, respectively. Echelon utilizes PostgreSQL for user account and conversation storage and Qdrant for vector storage and retrieval. Designed with flexibility in mind, Echelon can be deployed at any university, given basic institutional information such as course catalogs and degree requirements.

Cryptococcus is an invasive fungus that causes cryptococcosis, an infection that highly affects immunocompromised people. There are currently a limited number of antifungals available to treat Cryptococcus, and with the increased in antimicrobial resistance, we need different alternatives to treat fungal infections. Our lab has identified proteins involved in the synthesis of eicosanoids, which are lipid signaling molecules involved in regulating the immune response. Moreover, fungi can produce eicosanoids using different enzymes that humans do, opening a line to identify new drug targets using these pathways. Previously, our lab had identified genes upregulated in the presence of the eicosanoid’s precursor, arachidonic acid. Our goal is to use bioinformatics to predict and characterize the protein structure, using AlphaFold2, a machine learning application based on a deep neural network, and using this tool, identify small molecules that will bind to the proteins and help make drug design more efficient.

FWDX BioBlade is a web-based system designed to automate genetic sequence comparison for Fort Worth Diagnostics (FWDX), a company specializing in high-quality diagnostic reagents. FWDX faces a significant challenge: ensuring its reagents remain effective as pathogens mutate over time. Currently, this process is manual, time-intensive, and costly, relying on external bioinformatic consultants to compare existing reagent sequences against national and international genetic databases like NCBI and GISAID.

BioBlade improves this workflow by automating sequence comparisons, detecting mutations or deletions, and generating real-time reports. This automation significantly reduces turnaround time, improves accuracy, and lowers costs, empowering FWDX scientists and regulatory personnel with timely and accurate information. Key features include:
- Automated sequence analysis for efficient reagent validation
- Customizable query intervals for up-to-date comparisons
- A user-friendly reporting dashboard for streamlined decision-making

As artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to evolve, the need for efficient search and retrieval mechanisms for unstructured data has grown exponentially. Traditional relational databases, optimized for structured queries, struggle with the high-dimensional nature of modern AI-generated embeddings. This challenge has led to the rise of vector databases, specialized systems designed to store, index, and retrieve data based on similarity rather than exact matching.

This symposium explores the fundamental concepts of vector databases, their key components—such as vector embeddings, indexing techniques, and similarity search algorithms—and their advantages over traditional databases. We discuss how vector search operates using distance metrics like cosine similarity and Euclidean distance and compare the roles of vector databases and standalone vector indexes.

This project presents an interactive forecasting tool for Influenza-like Illness (ILI) trends using historical CDC data and machine learning models. Built with Python and Streamlit, the app enables users to visualize yearly ILI patterns, compare predictive models, and forecast future cases based on recent trends. Three models — Linear Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost — were evaluated using Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and R² Score. Surprisingly, Linear Regression achieved the best performance with an RMSE of 0.106 and R² of 0.960, indicating that simple models can be effective for this type of time-series data. The app also includes features for dynamic forecasting and CSV export, making it a practical tool for public health analysis and planning.