Esri cosponsors HACKtheMACHINE for U.S. Navy

Esri cosponsored HACKtheMACHINE, the United States Navy’s Digital Experience presented by the Naval Sea Systems Command, which took place Sept. 21–23 in Seattle.

The Naval Sea Systems Command hosted the event to drive the development of innovative digital capabilities that will help the navy protect the sea, air, space and subsurface domains in the 21st century.

The Seattle event connected developers to the needs of our nation’s navy and provided developers with access to Esri APIs and software developer kits. This will allow developers to bring context to maritime security situations through access to location data and spatial analytics tools.

Computers, data and digital communications underpin the global economy and delivery of the world’s life-sustaining services like food, power and clean water.

“HACKtheMACHINE is looking to reach out to a new generation and engage them in meaningful conversations about maritime security,” said Zac Staples, Fathom5 CEO, who founded the event while serving as the director of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Cyber Warfare. “It is designed to create opportunities to innovate, solve problems, and change the world for the better.”

“Esri is honored to be chosen as one of the sponsors for this event,” said Curt Hammill, navy account executive at Esri. “Our location intelligence solutions are used by all American military branches, and sponsoring HACKtheMACHINE gives us the opportunity to continue our proven history of supporting our armed services in their most critical missions.”

HACKtheMACHINE is composed of three tracks, and Esri participated in two of them. Track 2: Data Science & the Seven Seas, used data from ships under way on the high seas to develop algorithms to assist the navy with preventing collisions of human-operated and autonomous vessels.

Esri is also a solution provider for Track 3: Hack for the Oceans, in which teams put themselves in the position of the first responders after Hurricane Katrina. Each team will deploy applications to a similar environment to the navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networking and Enterprise Services (CANES) Agile Core Services system, emulating what value a first responder DevOps team could add in such a scenario.

Creative developers also had a chance to win an annual ArcGIS Developer Subscription for innovative use of the ArcGIS platform. Other prizes were awarded from other cosponsors.

HACKtheMACHINE was organized by Fathom5 and Booz Allen Hamilton, on behalf of the United States Navy.