The National Security Innovation Network awarded contracts to four winning teams from the startup and student tracks to continue developing their prototypes with the Department of Defense following the selection of their proposed concepts during the Reality Bytes: Visualizing Cyber Operations hackathon.
Two teams from the startup track – Cyberspatial and SeeSignal – each received $25,000 in contracts and the two teams from the student track – Team CyberCOP from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Team CyberVIEWS from Georgia Tech – won contracts valued at $10,000 each, NSIN said Tuesday.
The hackathon started on May 9 and the teams worked with Naval Information Warfare Systems Command to determine how gaming technologies could be used to track and visualize cyber operations. Participants used commercial-off-the-shelf virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to address cybersecurity military challenges.
On May 25, eight finalist teams advanced to the competition’s final round and demonstrated to judges their proposed cybersecurity platforms.
“We really wanted it [the hackathon] to be fun and interesting and compelling for people that we’d be hiring in the future to be able to defend the nation,” said Rachel Bondi, NAVWAR PMW 130’s technical director.
“It’s creating a community of people in industry that are interested in the cyber defense applications, specifically to the military and building that community. As far as the winners go, we have paths for them to pursue internally so that we can actually look at doing prototypes and perhaps pilots of their solutions,” Bondi added.
NSIN is a government program office within the office of the secretary for research and engineering at DOD and works with the venture community and universities to develop national security platforms.
