A Rhode Island company specializing in building underwater vehicles recently won a United States Navy-sponsored hackathon by targeting drug smuggling routes with artificial intelligence.
Bristol-based Composite Energy Technologies Inc. (CET), in conjunction with Spear AI and Current Lab, won first prize in the HACKtheMACHINE unmanned competition, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, multiple naval program executive offices, and industry partners.
The winners took home a cash prize of $15,000, but Chase Hogoboom, president of CET, said the true reward was working alongside unrelated businesses toward a common goal. The three winning companies first met via the 401 Tech Bridge based in Portsmouth and responded to the open call for competitors, according to Hogoboom.
The competition, held last December, was meant to attract technologists from across the public and private sector to develop innovative approaches to complex problems.
While the hackathon consisted of several tracks encompassing maritime cybersecurity, data science and digital engineering, CET focused on developing unmanned and autonomous technology at scale.
Working with Rhode Island-based Current Lab, a modeling and data firm focused on oceanography, CET helped visualize and present the data gathered by Spear AI's technology designed for national security. The team used the data to target hypothetical drug runners based on environmental conditions at sea.
"As a company who builds and designs underwater vehicles, we've had experience with large data sets so we helped visualize the input, environmental data and sea state to look at historically trafficked drug running routes," Hogoboom said. "So, with Spear's reinforcement learning model AI we were able to show paths these drug runners might use based on storm or other environmental conditions."
Hogoboom said winning HACKtheMACHINE has allowed CET and its partners to accelerate their current commercial applications, which in CET's case means continuing research, design, engineering and manufacturing of unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) hull structures, systems and components.
"I know that our three companies would not have normally worked together on something, so it's nice to be able to work within a multidisciplinary team that brings in expertise from their corners of the world," he said.
