Air Force details upcoming BRAVO Hackathon initiative

Air Force officials recently announced that applications are now open for the next BRAVO Hackathon initiative, an innovation and software development event that seeks to build emergent weapons system capabilities.

BRAVO 1 Canary Release will kick off July 18-22, 2022, at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia; Patrick Space Force Base, Florida; and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

Through the events, engineers, data scientists, data visualization, and user experience experts are slated to join product and use case owners from industry, academia, government, and citizenry to build operationally focused capabilities under the guidance of senior Department of Defense (DoD) leaders.

“A senior DoD official recently referred to the capability to deploy updates to SpaceX Starlink in response to data indicating jamming as eye-watering,” Department of the Air Force chief Digital Transformation Officer Stuart Wagner said. “This shouldn’t be the case. Every big tech company and some nation-states have already built automated pipelines that collect, aggregate, and fuse data to enable such capabilities.”

The Canary Release name is taken from a data-driven software release technique leveraged by technology companies where new software is introduced to a sample of users in production for telemetry collection and validation.

“DoD talks a lot about connecting weapons systems but has been too slow to implement groundbreaking, data-driven capabilities,” Wagner said. “BRAVO hackathons leverage existing Department of Defense technologies to provide hackers the development environment and operational data to rapidly build data-driven kill chains and cognitive electronic warfare capabilities. If you are a cleared or uncleared American citizen with technology skills looking to build national security capabilities during a one-week event, this is your opportunity.”