For much of the weekend of Feb. 28 – March 2, Patrick Jacobs was developing a speech-to-text program that could assist the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“DHS, they have a mountain of paperwork,” said Jacobs, a graduate student in mathematics at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). “If individual service members could speak instead of typing everything out, that would be pretty convenient.”
Jacobs and nine other students competed in the Designing Actionable Solutions for a Secure Homeland (DASSH) Student Design Challenge with 160 students from 15 universities. The students were divided into 37 teams – that competed online – with NCCU students divided into two teams.
Each team had a different problem. The team of Azaria Shabaz, who attended NCCU during her freshman year, worked on a plan to mitigate AI-enabled attacks on critical infrastructure.
“We came to the conclusion that there is no way to stop terrorism,” Shabaz said. Instead, her team devised a form of artificial intelligence that searches for suspicious key words or phrases and variations, such as ‘how do I build a bomb.’
After developing a solution, each team had to create a five-minute video explaining their solution to judges who included DHS professionals, academics and security experts.
“It needs to be something actionable,” said Patrick Flanigan, a postdoctoral researcher in the NCCU Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology. Flanigan arranged for NCCU to compete in DASSH.
“You have a really short amount of time,” Flanigan said. “All told, its less than two days of actual work time and you are competing against students who are veterans of this competition.”
Jacobs spent about 16 hours to build an application.
“I am still recovering from being sleep deprived,” Shabaz said several days after the competition.
While challenging, Flanigan said the competition helps build skills like coding and AI along with soft skills.
“Teamwork, working under harsh deadlines, problem solving,” Flanigan said. “How do you impress the judges? Do you shoot for a more difficult solution that is harder to implement and more likely to fail? Or a less difficult solution that might not be as impressive?”
This is NCCU’s first time competing in DASSH, although Flanigan hopes to see the university compete again.