Eastern Student Amanda Burkhart of Mansfield Center Gives Oral Presentation at CREATE Conference

2016 May 5

More than 250 talented students at Eastern Connecticut State University presented research and creative work at the university's second annual CREATE conference this past April. CREATE stands for Celebrating Research Excellence and Artistic Talent at Eastern, and is the university's premier, academic year-end showcase. At the culminating event, students of all majors presented professional posters, live music, dance performances, artwork, photography, documentaries and panel discussions.

Amanda Burkhart '17 of Mansfield Center, who majors in Pre-Secondary Education Certification and Mathematics, gave an oral presentation at the event. Her research, conducted with classmate Emily Hennessy, was titled "The Mathematics of Secret Messaging."

"Cryptography is the science of encrypting and decrypting data," said the students in a joint statement. "This presentation uses Modular arithmetic, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm and affine transformation to encode messages in order to secure them. This has implications on a lot of real life applications from credit card use to Internet safety. In particular, basic techniques such as Hill and Caesar Cipher and RSA are used to encode and decode secret messages. A more sophisticated technique involving affine transformations is also used for the encryption. We show that the more sophisticated the algorithm, the less likely a third party can decrypt the message."

Remarking on the variety of presentations, Professor Dickson Cunningham, conference co-chair, said, "CREATE encapsulates the essence of the liberal arts in one afternoon. It is an intellectual smorgasbord."

Speaking to the value of CREATE, Eastern President Elsa Nunez said, "It takes a very strong and dedicated student to produce this quality of work, and it's important for other students to see this output." Praising the faculty, she added, "It takes a committed and skillful mentor to guide students to the work that is on display. Mentorship is such an integral part of undergraduate research."

During the one-day conference, the Student Center crawled with artistic and scholarly activity. Students in professional attire addressed their peers, faculty and family. In the cafe, ensembles performed; in the theatre, student-produced documentaries were shown; in the Betty R. Tipton Room, aisles of posters depicting scientific research were displayed; across the hall, a gallery-worth of paintings lined the walls; and on the ground floor, panel discussions and oral presentations about the humanities took place.