By Claudia Loucks
Geneseo Current

Nathan McAvoy, a 2022 graduate of Geneseo High School, now a freshman at Arizona State University, was a member of the team of five Arizona State University students that won a $10,000 prize for creating a design to divert a domestic terrorist attack. He is the son of Jeff and Holly McAvoy, Geneseo.

It was all part of a Devils Invent event, which took pace earlier this year in the Engineering Center on the Tempe campus and via Zoom. Devils Intent is a series of design challenges put on by ASU’s IRA A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

Theme of the event was “Protecting America’s Public Access Areas” and featured the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Information from the university stated that the hackathon brought together 23 teams from 11 colleges across the country, including Northeastern University, San Diego State University, the University of Columbia and California State University, Los Angeles.

The goal of the challenge was to design effective responses to Department of Homeland Security threats in what are described as soft locations such as churches, museums, schools, stadiums and other public places. Organizers paired students with academic and industry mentors to solve problem scenarios.

Prizes, ranging from $2,500 to $10,000 were awarded at the end of the event, in a ceremony that was co-hosted by Northeastern University’s Soft Target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat Reality Center of Excellence and ASU’s Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency.

The hackathon gave students the opportunity to successfully tackle real-life emergencies and grow form the experience. Participants were tasked with designing responses to one of three following prompts:

-How do we guide crowds to good decisions during an attack?

-How do we enable effective and timely communication among stakeholders and responders to allow for oversight and response to an attack?

-How can we inform and enable civilians to prepare for a drone attack?

The winning team, “Malindo,” was made of up five computer science students including McAvoy. They competed in the prompt: How do we enable effective and timely communication among stakeholders and responders to allow for oversight and response to an attack?

The image of an armed terrorist was part of the winning design created by the ASU team Malindo.

The team spent 30 hours in the Engineering Center working on the project.

“We had good snacks and a lot of Red Bulls,” McAvoy said.

The weekend-long event kicked off with a keynote speaker, George Naccara, a retired admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard and former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security.