The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) hackathon brought together London-based machine learning startups, experts from the defence industry and academia to tackle two difficult challenges.
The DASA hackathon was divided into two different hackathons; the Real-World Incident Response Hackathon and the Defence Logistics Hackathon.
Real-World Incident Response Hackathon; 26–27 November 2018
The real-world incident response hackathon kicked off on November 26th at CentrEd at ExCel London. The risky (and exciting) element of this challenge: participants weren’t aware of the hackathon details until they arrived on site. After being presented with a case-study, teams were tasked to find specific elements within multi-formatted multimedia files.
The teams worked hard to ingest the data, make sense of it to create a narrative of the incident and uncover clues to help the investigation team.
A strong team of mentors were available to help the teams develop their projects and live streams were launched throughout the second day to test the solutions. All of the hard work and dedication made for a very intense and exciting hack!
Defence Logistics Hackathon: 29–30 November 2018
On November 29th, the defence logistics hackathon brought in an entirely new group of participants and proposed a different challenge — one that required hacking multi-source top-secret data from the C130J Hercules platform—sounds intense, right?. The teams had to develop shared solutions across multi-national domains, all while maintaining classification and permission-based access rules at machine speed. No easy task!
Team names were decided thanks to the infamous team creation roulette — then it was time to get to work!
Thanks to the mentors, teams gleaned valuable insights into the data and tweaked their solutions according to the experts’ insights. Winners then pitched their final solutions to the DASA accelerator for a chance to funding.
The teams were super-troopers as they battled through the hack, faced many obstacles along the way and came out the other side victorious!
Congratulations to all the teams who worked relentlessly in the limited time!
It wasn’t all work and no play — teams put their piloting skills to the test thanks to the Drone Race and enjoyed some friendly competition during the Buzzer Quiz challenge.
You can find photos from the Incident Response Hack and Defence Logistics Hackathon on Flickr.
If you’re looking to take on another hackathon challenge, check out our upcoming tech events here: bemyapp.com/events.
