A British Army officer who was part of last year’s winning military and industrial collaborative Hackathon team, is proof that such military and industrial partnerships are key to the development of the battle winning digital tools of the future.
Captain Jordan Kemp, Operations Officer at 9 Regiment Royal Logistic Corps (RLC) was part of the winning team for Hackathon 2020 with their dashboard concept designed to help military planners understand the cyber vulnerabilities of Logistics Infrastructure.
“Hackathon’s are traditionally aimed at the cyber and intelligence community, so as a non-technical officer I was unsure of what I could contribute." Captain Kemp, Operations Officer at 9 Regiment Royal Logistic Corps
This year she is playing a key part too, as 2IC (second in command) helping to organise Hackathon 2021. The Army and artificial intelligence software leader Adarga, once again join forces at the BattleLab, Defence’s new £5.7m cyber testing space in Dorset for the event from 15 to 17 September.
Hackathon 2021 draws together teams from across 1st (UK) Division and the UK tech sector to explore new ways to solve real-world challenges faced by the Field Army.
Captain Kemp said that with no previous experience in digital innovation, she was apprehensive leading up to last year’s event.
“Hackathon’s are traditionally aimed at the cyber and intelligence community, so as a non-technical officer I was unsure of what I could contribute."
“However, it was clear once we started working with the data scientists that having military users involved from the start was crucial; we were able to clearly define the problem set and understood how the Army operates, which meant the industry specialists were delivering realistic solutions, that as a user the Army would benefit from”.
“We found that the information needed was available on open source but the volume is overwhelming for most military analysts to process so the team created a digital tool that would exploit the vast quantities of data, packaged to help military planners in their assessment of risk and subsequent decision making”
The event forms part of the 1st (UK) Division’s Digital Readiness Experiment (DRE) which seeks to accelerate the Army’s understanding of digital force preparation timelines and processes.
Delivered in conjunction with Adarga, it will see 10 teams made up of military subject matter experts, software engineers and data scientists from across industry come together to deliver against a series of challenges that all lend themselves to data, software or algorithm driven solutions.
A judging panel consisting of senior military and industry experts will assess the 10 concepts and recommendations before deciding on the 5 concepts that will be developed into a prototype over the following 8 weeks.
This will form part of the 1st (UK) Division’s DRE, designed to accelerate the Army’s understanding and ability to adapt to digital force preparation timelines and processes, and will take place ahead of Exercise Rhino Charge in November 2021 where they’ll be tested in a real-world environment.
The solutions will be designed to address issues such as finding digital ways of understanding routes for military convoys, understanding the impact of environmental factors on future missions or deployments and the best ways of extracting casualties.
For more information on the Hackathon 2021 and the results, visit DSEI today where the Army and Adarga are exhibiting.