A pair of Penn students were among the winners of a Philadelphia maritime defense hackathon last week.
The event, hosted by Albacore Inc. from March 27 to March 29, invited more than 150 builders to develop solutions and construct prototypes for the future of maritime defense. Second-year computer information systems graduate student Jen Shi and College sophomore Lela Sengupta were both members of winning teams.
Participants competed across various categories, including software, hardware, and mountable sensing equipment. In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian, Dante Vaisbort — a co-founder of Albacore Inc. — described the event as an opportunity to expand interest in shipbuilding and defense to the East Coast.
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker— who graduated from the Fels Institute of Government in 2016 — delivered the event’s keynote speech. During her remarks, according to Vaisbort, Parker discussed her goal to make Philadelphia a defense technology hub, as well as the city’s shipbuilding and maritime history.
Vaisbort added that United States Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) sent a video to “talk about the importance of these problem sets for the students.”
“I think that was really, really generous of them, and goes to show how important some of these problems are to our national security and the important role that students can play in building the next steps,” Vaisbort said.
In an interview with the DP, Shi — who competed in the Maritime Domain Awareness track — stated that she did not expect her team to win. At the event, Shi used her background in data analysis and open source intelligence to create a maritime model mapping out the locations of both safe passages and possible dangers, such as mines.
According to Shi, “no dares to ship” products to areas with “the possibility of mines,” so her team’s solution focused on a “financial impact, economic perspective.”
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She added that she decided to participate in the hackathon to “learn about what the problems are in this space” and “widen the horizon of things that an engineer could use our skills to solve.”
“I think there are a lot of real-world existing challenges for engineers to solve, and this seems like a domain that you can learn about and try to solve some of those challenges,” Shi said. “I feel like every engineer, especially all Penn engineers, should try to just go out there and talk to people who might be needing their skill set, and oftentimes it will surprise you.”
Shi also discussed the advice she received from members of the defense industry at the hackathon, stating that “they encouraged us to try and spend the time and focus on one specific thing, and not go super broad and try to solve every single problem.”
Engineering junior Sam Hoffman — who is also a first-year graduate student in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics program — participated in the hackathon.
Hoffman told the DP that his fellow teammates competed in the hardware category and built a waterproof autonomous submarine.
He stated that the hackathon provided his team with an opportunity to apply academic theories they learned in classes and clubs.
“A lot of us don’t have experience in submersibles or in the maritime space at all,” Hoffman said, clarifying that “we’re more aerospace focused, so it was really cool for us to venture into this and learn about the world of maritime.”
Among the judges of the competition were founders, chief executive officers, and investors in defense technology and venture capital firms.
