Naval Postgraduate School Hackathon

Behind the Scenes of the Inaugural NPS AI Hackathon: Supporting Mission-Driven Innovation

In December, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) hosted its first-ever AI Hackathon—a weeklong event where NPS students, Marine Corps mission partners, and industry professionals came together to solve real-world defense problems using artificial intelligence and machine learning. As someone fortunate enough to help organize and support this initiative, I wanted to share a few reflections on the event and what it took to make it a success.

My role in the hackathon involved several layers of coordination and support:

• Identifying Mission-Relevant Challenges: I worked closely with Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity (MCTSSA) to identify and define problems that were both technically meaningful and directly relevant to current Navy and Marine Corps missions. This alignment ensured that the student teams were solving problems that mattered—not just theoretically, but operationally.

• Coordinating Topic Partners: I helped bring in the right stakeholders from across the services and industry to serve as topic partners, providing expertise, guidance, and mission context. This collaboration helped shape the problem space and kept the focus on high-impact, real-world outcomes.

• Infrastructure and Resource Support: To enable effective problem-solving, I assisted with getting Marines and student teams set up with the computing resources they needed—including access to NPS’s high-performance “Hamming” supercomputer and GPU-accelerated environments. These capabilities were crucial for handling the scale of data and complexity of the AI models used.

• Hands-On Technical Contribution: In addition to supporting the organizational side, I also had the opportunity to get into the weeds with some of the code. Collaborating with student teams and mentors, I worked on parts of the implementation to improve performance and usability of the Lessons Learned tool enhancements.

Throughout the event, I was consistently impressed by the creativity, collaboration, and technical depth that each team brought to the table. Students came from a wide range of military backgrounds and academic specializations, yet they quickly gelled into cohesive teams, diving deep into AI/ML applications ranging from NLP and large language models to data fusion and predictive analytics.

Events like these underscore the importance of combining hands-on engineering with mission relevance. The hackathon wasn't just an academic exercise—it was a step toward operational advantage, where emerging technologies are rapidly prototyped and tested against actual defense needs.

As NPS looks to make these hackathons a regular fixture of the curriculum, I’m proud to have contributed to this first iteration. It’s clear that these events create lasting value—for students, for mission partners, and for the Department of the Navy as a whole.

Looking ahead, I’m excited about the next set of challenges we’ll take on—and the new innovations we’ll deliver in support of those who serve. Please see the links below to the websites for the newsletter! I am in the group photo in the green polo shirt!

Newsletter: https://nps.edu/-/nps-hosts-ai-hackathon-for-students-to-solve-military-operational-problems
Archived Newsletter: https://web.archive.org/web/20250520062417/https://nps.edu/-/nps-hosts-ai-hackathon-for-students-to-solve-military-operational-problems