Hosted by AI startup Code Metal, the three-day event challenged teams to automate urban infrastructure for security
The Metal Ops: Smart City Hackathon, a hackathon investigating smart city innovations, wrapped up successfully in downtown Boston just last month.
The three- day event taking place from March 14-16 was set up by AI startup Code Metal and challenged teams to develop innovative solutions that leverage urban infrastructure for United States Special Operations Command missions.
Participants from institutions such as Harvard University, the University of Boston and the Department of Defense comprised the 14 teams.
The winning team, Team Medarus, won for its Lantern project that used passive sensor nodes hidden in everyday objects and existing city infrastructure to track vehicles for surveillance purposes.
The sensors work by collecting vehicle data such as tire pressure signals.
“The concept envisions forming a low-power mesh network to relay information back to a command center, enabling near-continuous monitoring even in traditionally unmonitored areas,” Code Metal said in a press release.
With an open design and low deployment cost, Lantern is designed to “integrate seamlessly into smart city systems or specialized operations,” Code Metal said. Potential use cases include government, defense and municipal stakeholders.
Team Medarus included David Neary, an RF/Cyber research and development program manager; Anton Njavro, a computer science student at Boston University; Ryan Nguyen, a statistics student at Harvard; and Djordje Ivanovic, a computer science student at Harvard.
“Project Lantern checked every box we had as organizers — and the judges agreed,” said Peter Morales, Code Metal’s CEO. “They identified a truly unique capability: remotely reading RFID tags from tires. Then they built a hardware solution, deployed sensors and actually tested it in the city.”
“Lantern didn’t just prototype something, they proved it could work in a real-world environment. That’s what made them stand out,” he added.
Other standout teams included Team C:4 from MIT, which secured second place with Project Code Three — a system designed to rapidly process and analyze bodycam footage for real-time decision-making.
Third place was awarded to a team from the Department of Defense’s Special Forces for their project, Unsanitized Inputs, which proposed novel data security measures for urban networks.
With the success of this year’s hackathon Code Metal said it anticipates future collaborations to further integrate smart city technologies into national security strategies.
“We set out to create a mission-oriented event where teams could build real technology with real-world use cases, especially in government or city deployments,” said Morales.“There’s a strong dual-use potential here: SOCOM gains strategic advantages in smart city environments, and Boston benefits from tech that boosts urban resilience and modernization.”
Morales also said the hackathon came about as companies grapple with the increasingly sophisticated nature of AI attacks.
“What has us really thinking right now is the idea that AI can attempt millions of different attacks on a system, rapidly trying every known exploit and even discovering new ones. This changes the game,” he said.
“We have to go beyond static exploit scanning. We need systems that can withstand active, intelligent adversaries constantly probing for weaknesses. Security hardening will become a much more dynamic, ongoing process and AI will be both the attacker and defender in that ecosystem.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Scarlett Evans
Quelle/Source: IOT World Today, 02.04.2025
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