2026 Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference

Today’s brilliant minds are being recruited and conditioned to hack without remorse. The growth of CTFs and cybercrime is creating a new threat—Hacker Gangs. It starts with curiosity and then progressively increases to full-on hacking, as small wins receive appreciation from peers that once ignored these amazing minds. Join Jessica Gulick to discuss how we can create a Defender’s Code that helps our youth stay on the right path and make better decisions without hindering innovation and curiosity.

GT Edge AI will be presenting on Build Your Own AI Cyber Home Lab powered by Dell and NVIDIA!

AI is reshaping cybersecurity, but most people's experience stops at ChatGPT. Home labs are already a proven way to build cyber skills, and this workshop extends that model to AI.

In this hands on workshop you will build your own AI agent, no code and no prior AI experience needed, and point it at a real security task like phishing triage, incident response drafting, or tutoring a student through a cyber concept. Along the way you will pick up the foundations that make it all make sense: what inference is, how tokens work, and why the choice between open and closed models matters. All of it demonstrated live rather than on slides.

You will also see where the data actually goes. We will run the same agent two ways, on a hosted model and on a fully air gapped local system, and compare them side by side. That difference is the whole ballgame for anyone handling real phishing samples, student records, or anything sensitive, and it is the question every school and organization is about to face.

You will leave with an install runbook to rebuild the lab at home, and a classroom ready module you can run with your own students.

Built for educators, students, early career practitioners, and the AI curious. No prior AI experience required.