Forum Discussion
MicrosoftAnnouncing the winner of the Microsoft and CCI Innovation Challenge for Virginia
For this round of the Innovation Challenge, we worked with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative to engage students from Virginia. We asked participants to tackle real world use cases that will advance the missions of our government agencies. Participants had 5 days to form teams, design, build, and present solutions leveraging Microsoft Foundry to deliver compelling, scalable economic and societal value supported by evidence, clear beneficiaries, and responsible safeguards. To assess these projects, many of the judges for this round are folks who work directly with Microsoft’s public sector customers, and several come to Microsoft through the Hiring our Heroes program. The hackathon was a demonstration of AI for good, uniting students, veterans, government stakeholders, and industry experts around a shared goal: using technology to create lasting economic and societal impact for our communities.
Participants were asked to choose from these three challenges
- Disaster assistance navigator: an AI front door for trusted disaster assistance, service discovery, and human escalation
- SCuBA Security Application: OSCAL-based representation of SCuBA security baseline content and / or assessment results
- Policy and Public Sentiment Analyst: Turn legislation, regulations, news, and public feedback into transparent, evidence-grounded policy insights
Judges awarded points based on a projects
- Performance
- Innovation
- Economic value and societal impact
- Feasibility
We’re excited to announce the winner of the $10,000 prize is Last Mile: built to help people recovering from disaster to quickly find relevant resources based on their location and needs. It supports multilingual alert transformation, fraud checks, low-data access, and signed recovery plans that can be resumed across devices. Congratulations to George Mason University students Iamen R Ibrahim (LinkedIn GitHub) and Caleb Zerihun (LinkedIn GitHub) A really strong project!
While we only awarded a single prize for this hackathon, there were more than a dozen very strong entries. Check out the repos below to see some great examples.
Thank you to everyone who participated! And huge thank you for the judges who took the time to carefully evaluate all the entries! Showing up in the community as Microsoft at our best: Drew Kozak Kavitha Subramaniam Carlie Blacklidge Ryan Fairbrother Dick Tracy II Matthew Gibbs Tu Tran Kendall Weistroffer and Prosenjit Das