SURF Award Recipients

Congratulations to Kadin Matotek and Huy Nguyen for receiving the WCU-Student Undergraduate Research Foundation (SURF) Spring 2026 Awards!

Kadin’s project seeks to extend his prior award-winning research on evaluating the problem-solving limitations of locally hosted Large Language Models (LLMs). He aims to perform a comprehensive, multi-model analysis of code generation reliability across diverse architectures and scales. Through the Spring 2026 semester, Kadin will conduct controlled experiments using an enhanced offline evaluation pipeline. The study will expand from the initial eight open-source models to more than fifty, spanning sizes from small (0.5B) to mid-scale (14B) parameters. Each model will be benchmarked across datasets including HumanEval, MBPP+, CodeContests, and custom-curated Kattis and LeetCode corpora.

Huy’s project focuses on analyzing, understanding, and modifying the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) to enhance its security and user access management features. Students will investigate the protocol structure, identify unused header spaces, and embed additional security-related information without adding overhead. The project also aims to improve performance by refining or removing low-priority steps. Testing will be conducted using real network data, and results will be shared for collaborative evaluation.