Stanford Hacking for Defense v3.0

Coming off an outstanding visit to our National Capital where we had a chance to show Congressional staff just how impactful Hacking for Defense is as a means to get great young men and women involved in working on things that are important to our National Security (see the news here), I'm really jazzed to be back in Palo Alto to get things stirred up here once more.

It's finals week for the winter quarter at Stanford University which means we are getting ready to kick off our 3rd Hacking for Defense course at Stanford in just a couple weeks. I'm thrilled to be back on the teaching bench with Steve Blank and Steve Weinstein where it's a battle to see which one of us learns the most during the course. I'm equally excited to see Ranger (and Ph.d) Jeff Decker join us to fill Joe Felter's shoes while he is once more serving his country in the Pentagon. I'm equally stoked to have a couple of special guests join us this year. First, Alex Osterwalder will be on hand during week two to give our students a leg up as they start to really dig into beneficiary discovery and value propositions. Then a few weeks later Ted Koppel, former newscaster and author of the New York Times Best Seller, Lights Out: A Cyber Attack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath, will join us as well.

We are proud to see our plank owning course advisors, former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and Stanford Venture Technology Program Director Tom Byers back again. Also joining us this year as course advisors are Arun Majumdar, former ARPA-E Director and now Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, and Sally Benson, Co-Director of the Precourt Institute for Energy. Finally, to show how seriously Stanford takes the transformational nature of this course, John Mitchell, Stanford's Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning will also join us as an advisor.

Rounding out the teaching team are the real workhorses, our teaching assistants. Sam Jackson, (a 2nd year MBA candidate at the Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Will Papper (an undergraduate in symbolic systems) were students in last year's H4D course. Will is now the founder and CEO of Librarian.ai, one of six companies to spin out of previous H4D classes. Joining Sam and Will are Annie Shiel, an MA candidate in International Studies and Paricha Duangtaweesub, a graduate student in the Design Impact Program with a focus on energy and climate change.

Everything Begins with a Problem

Thanks to our continued partnership with MD5 and the Office of Naval Research we have an exceptional array of problems for the course this year. Particularly interesting to me is seeing a problem (accountability during evacuation) I had as a young Captain in the 3rd Ranger Battalion show back up on my doorstep 20+ years later (thanks Craig Nixon and Frank Kearney for the many opportunities to learn how to count moving targets in the dark). It's interesting to note that having a 20-year-old problem show up in an H4D class is not unusual. There are thousands of zombie problems (a problem with a life of its own, that nobody wants to touch) like this one that have been around forever and aren't sexy enough to get lots of attention, but serve as one of the many things that increase the cognitive burden of service members on the front lines.

Here's the rest of a really interesting slate of problems:

Accountability during evacuation (US Special Operations Command): Build a way for a leader to keep account of which specific individuals have entered a vehicle or helicopter in order to decrease evacuation time and leave no one behind.

Cyber protection for ship based navigation systems (US Navy, Office of Naval Research): Develop a means for test engineers to conduct adequate cyber-testing of US Navy ship based navigation systems.

Installation level utility coordination (US Navy Facilities Engineering & Expeditionary Warfare Center): Develop a way for Navy and Marine Corps public works officers to partner with local utility companies in order to insure reliable delivery of power to an installation and to prevent power outages.

Personnel recovery hydration (US Air Force Research Lab): Provide a way for pilots shot down in combat to remain hydrated for 28 days.

Identifying objects from high resolution imagery (US Air Force Air Combat Command, 9th Intelligence Surveillance & Reconnaissance Squadron): Develop the capability for analysts to automate object identification in order to focus on the highest priority geographic areas most relevant to their information requirement.

E-Acquisition (Section 809 Panel/Defense Acquisition University): Enable acquisition professionals to automatically develop and coordinate program documentation related to defense acquisition.

Personnel recovery power (US Air Force Research Lab, 711th Human Performance Wing): Provide a way for pilots shot down in combat to keep critical electronic devices such as survival radios powered for 28 days.

Interested in supporting the Stanford class as an advisor for one of the teams? Please reach out to Jeff Decker at [email protected].

If you are interested in learning more about Hacking for Defense academic programs, please shoot a note to the team at H4Di.org.

Pete Newell: Building innovation tools to solve the worlds hardest problems @peteranewell, @hacking4defense, @bmntpartners, @H4Xlabs