{"id":159979,"date":"2022-05-31T10:44:46","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T20:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/?p=159979"},"modified":"2022-05-31T10:44:46","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T20:44:46","slug":"reality-bytes-hackathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hawaii.edu\/news\/2022\/05\/31\/reality-bytes-hackathon\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality ‘bytes’ the dust, UH<\/abbr> M\u0101noa students conquer national hackathon"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>
\"three
Yoshiki Takagi, Roderick Tabalba and Michael Rogers are Team CyberCOP<\/abbr><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A University of Â鶹´«Ã½<\/span> at M\u0101noa team of Information and Computer Sciences Department<\/a> graduate students took home $10,000 as one of two winners in the student division of a national hackathon competition. Their project, CyberCOP<\/abbr> (Common Operating Picture), is a virtual reality application designed to support cyber operators in denied, degraded, intermittent or low-bandwidth environments.<\/p>\n

PhD<\/abbr> student Yoshiki Takagi<\/strong>, and master\u2019s students Michael Rogers<\/strong> and Roderick Tabalba<\/strong>, presented their project to military leaders on May 25 in the final round of “Reality Bytes: Visualizing Cyber Operations<\/a>,” hosted by the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN<\/abbr>). During electronic or cyber attacks, CyberCOP<\/abbr> alerts users and automatically reroutes network traffic based on a modified shortest-path algorithm, optimized for network capacity.<\/p>\n

Takagi, Rogers and Tabalba are students in Professor Jason Leigh<\/strong>\u2019s Laboratory for Advanced Visualization and Applications<\/a> (LAVA<\/abbr>). CyberCOP<\/abbr> was based on SatWatch—believed to be the first-ever virtual reality application for visualizing satellites orbiting the Earth. SatWatch was the work of LAVA<\/abbr> undergraduate National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates student, Ryan Theriot<\/strong>, who became a full-time research software engineer at LAVA<\/abbr>.<\/p>\n

“We were thrilled to be part of this hackathon and to win was a big surprise to us,” Rogers said. “None of us had competed in this type of event before, but luckily, we had the skills and experience from working at LAVA<\/abbr> to help us succeed.”<\/p>\n

Rogers added, “We would like to give a special thanks to our professors Jason Leigh and Mahdi Belcaid<\/strong> for their support and encouragement throughout the course of the hackathon. We would also like to acknowledge Ryan Theriot for giving us full access to his code for viewing satellites in virtual reality, which allowed us to build a working prototype of our solution in under a week. We will be splitting the money evenly across the team members to continue sharpening our skills in computer science.”<\/p>\n