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Participants
Anyone can register individually for the challenge. Each member of a team must register individually.
Online participants are welcome.
All participants must agree to the NATO Innovation Challenge official rules.
Teams
Each participant can only be on one team.
Teams of one or more members are welcome.
Online teams are welcome.
A team can submit more than one abstract.
Scenario
A key part of crisis management is optimizing information management, service coordination, and decision making. When these functions are done well, they enable organizations to either prevent the crisis from occurring, or anticipate the effects and mitigate the impact of the crisis through an effective response. Complexity increases if there are multiple locations, agencies, countries, and organizations involved.
In this fictitious scenario, NATO forces have been deployed to a small, land locked country, to assist in responding to the outbreak of an unknown disease.
The disease is lethal but takes weeks to manifest. Deaths have started to occur in villages and towns across a broad area of the country triggering scenes of looting and riots between different ethnic groups and favoring the rise of an insurgency.
Effective response is difficult because parts of the country are under insurgent control. Entry into these areas has resulted in pitched battles between government and insurgent forces. Additionally, the insurgents have been conducting a terrorist campaign in the two major cities. Insurgent forces are currently headed towards one of the cities with the assumed goal of obtaining medical supplies and provisions.
NATO forces have been sent to assist the country to establish and maintain control of the situation and enable medical and other response personnel to resolve the medical crisis before it spreads.
The challenge: NATO forces must quickly understand this increasingly complex situations in order to adapt as fast as possible.
But to do so, like all major organizations, they face information management issues related to acquisition; digitization; an exponential increase in data volumes (more and more sensors of increasing efficiency); a variety of data-types (videos, photos and text in any format, audio, etc.); and near-continuous data transmission. The profusion of sources of information available, whether open source or collected from autonomous sources, including those of their own capabilities (drones, electronic warfare, space observation, radar, embassies, etc.…) makes the fusion and exploitation of data particularly complex.
These challenges are made more difficult due to political factors, the requirement to operate in a coalition, conflict, terrorism, and the health situation.
The overall goal of this competition is to identify innovative solutions leveraging technology and enabling security officials to predict and anticipate where and when adverse events may occur, so they may take preemptive action, or effectively respond when these events do happen.
Topics
Abstracts and Solutions should address one or more of the following topics,
- Data Filtering and Fusing
- Visualization
- Predictive Analytics
Selection and pre-selection
Based on their abstracts, teams are preselected on 28 April to compete and present their solutions on 29 May.
Winning teams are selected on 29 May.
Criteria
- Usefulness: potential impact of proposed solution on challenge topic
- Innovativeness: genuinely new idea or an already existing solution adapted for this Challenge?
- Feasibility: is the solution easy and cheap to develop and implement?
Prizes include,
Up to EUR 25,000 for solution development and stage-time at a NATO-wide event.
Ask questions through email at [email protected]