AI Agents for Defense and Gov. Hackathon
Hacking with my team along with some Maryland Terps seated right next to us!
This event happened a couple months ago (Sat. 3/29/25) and it was certainly very cool, so I don’t want to forget about it. I saw that the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) was going to host its second hackathon in Crystal City, Virginia. This was a one-day hackathon with a total prize pool of $50K. That’s a lot of money for a one day hackathon! For those who are unfamiliar, SCSP.ai is the brainchild of former Google Chairman/CEO Eric Schmidt. The organization’s goal is to study and make policy recommendations on how to stay competitive with respect to artificial intelligence (AI). We all know that AI technology is one of the bedrocks of currently ongoing great powers competition among nation-states. I didn’t end up going to the first hackathon last year because I didn’t know about it, but I learned about this second hackathon from my friend. He went to the first one and said it was very fancy and very well done. I wanted to see for myself what SCSP.ai’s hackathons were really like. I didn’t know what to expect, but I decided to just sign up and show up. Sometimes that’s the key to everything, you know? Have a nose for opportunity and just show up when others are not willing to.
I learned that SCSP was partnering with AGI House for this hackathon. AGI House is like a startup incubator/VC fund focused specifically on artificial general intelligence (AGI). The AGI leadership team and team members I saw at the hackathon were very nice people. They flew in from the bay area just for this hackathon, which I’m very grateful for. Thank you!
The first thing about the hackathon once I arrived at the SCSP building lobby was that most people came to the hackathon with teams already formed. People flew in from around the country and even Canada, and I was one of the few participants there who was local to the DMV without a team. A lot of people there were students either in undergrad or in masters programs. You had people from a lot of different universities, including many from the top STEM universities in the US and Canada. I had to quickly network and build a team. I honestly didn’t know if I would even be able to form a team. Most of the people there were what I would call professional hackers, in that hackathons were what they did. They came with sleeping bags and so much work gear that it was intimidating. Nevertheless, I tried everything to network and was not able to join a good existing team. Therefore, I decided to just make a team of my own. When there was an opportunity to make an announcement publicly during the opening ceremony, I was the only one that took a chance and announced that I was looking to form a team. It’s all about risk taking. Luckily, two other people wanted to work with me and we ended up recruiting a third person. As a team of four that formed organically, we ended up working pretty well together! Lesson learned is: if something is important, you do it in spite of the fear and insecurity you are feeling.
We submitted the project Port Sentinel. This project aimed to build a port city vulnerability scanner as well as a maritime port digital twin dashboard into one comprehensive platform. We didn’t get everything working, but we were able to create a frontend demo and able to record a demo to present to the judges. Overall, we didn’t have a good chance to win the hackathon given some of the projects the other teams presented were far superior. But I was very proud of the project because we put in a winning effort. From not having a team in the beginning to submitting a finished project in the end, I was very happy with how things turned out even though we didn’t win. It would have been far worse if the team didn’t submit a project or people quit in the middle. SCSP is hosting another hackathon in June and this time it’s a three-day hackathon. Let’s see how it goes next time!