Air Force Test Center Unveils Third Data Hackathon Winners

The Air Force Test Center has announced the winners of the third edition of its Data Hackathon event during which participants were provided with complex data problems to solve. Individuals that joined the program used open-source and Air Force-provided tools to tackle the challenges.

AFTC hosted the five-day competition, which began on Aug. 8, virtually and in person at Edwards Air Force Base, California. Participants were from the 96th Test Wing at Eglin AFB, Edwards AFB and Arnold Engineering Development Complex, among other military units, AF. mil reported.

Team Orange won first place in the competition for its multidomain test force environment that gathered automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast data for comparison with time-space-position information to validate mission data. Using ADS-B also enabled the platform to show a visual representation of flight paths for a given area.

Team Gold secured second place for demonstrating existing systems that eliminate manual data scraping and enables real-time, integrated dashboards to support the data needs of all commander units.

Third place was given to Team Blue, which used data sets from a Skyborg autonomous aircraft flight test to identify datalink dropouts and create visualizations using Plotly to see the aircraft’s activity in case of datalink issues.

The first Data Hackathon event was conducted in November 2021. “We use this event as an opportunity to simultaneously identify and develop organic capability, solve real data problems, and drive digital transformation within test,” said Capt. Troy Soileau, 96th Cyberspace Test Group’s chief data officer. 

Soileau organized the Hackaton together with Nathan Cook, CDO of the 96th Operations Group.