ICS graduate students Michael Rogers, Roderick Tabalba, and Yoshiki Takagi were $10,000 winners in the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) “Reality Bytes” Hackathon. All three students are working with professors Jason Leigh and Mahdi Belcaid in the LAVA Lab.
The winning submission, CyberCOP (Common Operating Picture) is a virtual reality application designed to support cyber operators in denied, degraded, intermittent, or low-bandwidth environments. The team’s solution places cyber operators inside the COP using stereoscopic 3D and spatial audio to provide the ultimate level of situational awareness. Cyber operators can focus on their missions and experiences can be shared real-time with other key stakeholders for faster and more accurate decision-making. Using visual and aural cues, CyberCOP alerts users of electronic or cyber attacks and automatically reroutes network traffic based on a modified shortest-path algorithm, optimized for network capacity.
CyberCOP utilized codefrom an earlier project called SatWatch, a VR application for satellite tracking previously done by ICS undergraduate Ryan Theriot.
UH’s Office of Innovation and Commercialization is one of 25 educational institutions that have partnered with NSIN to help build innovators who generate new solutions to national security problems in the U.S. “Reality Bytes in partnership with UH and several other universities helps identify and support the research talent that our university has,” said GloriaChoo, NSIN’s program director at UH. “This is also about building and fostering a community of practice and networks that can solve our real world challenges in the Department of Defense.”