The Department of the Air Force will host its third BRAVO hackathon, this time to test whether permissive development modeling using classified data is more cost-effective than traditional means in prototyping weapon capabilities, Space Force News reported Wednesday.
The competition will be held on March 20 to 24 at Hurlburt Field air base in Florida, and is open to applicants within and outside the department.
BRAVO was launched in 2021 to leverage real data from the Department of Defense in testing and validating military innovations. Interested participants may apply for one of three roles. Non-government applicants can try out for the hacker role if they have competencies in product management, data science, machine learning, software development and/or user interface/user design.
The subject matter expert and supporter roles are open to government applicants and government contractors that can share their knowledge or use case to the teams. They will also be responsible for event security and organization.
“BRAVO moves from the traditional DoD development model operating at the unclassified level where we push code up to protected environments, to a permissive development model on protected data, which we refer to as ‘Dev High,’” said Stuart Wagner, DAF’s chief digital transformation officer and hackathon organizer. “This enables developers to build weapons’ capabilities and calibrations directly with the data at lower cost compared to traditional prototyping pipelines and at a rate faster than an adversary is likely to build countering capability. This event will test how ‘Dev High’ scales to joint multi-domain use cases,” he explained.
