A bit of a departure from competitive cybersecurity, but too good not to mention: Penn State’s Lion-0xA team was selected as one of just ten teams worldwide, out of hundreds of submissions, to advance to the global finals of Amazon’s Nova AI Challenge — and I’m part of the team.
What the Challenge Is #
The Nova AI Challenge pits university teams against each other with a shared goal: making AI agents better and safer. It’s a cross-college effort at Penn State, pulling together students from the College of Information Sciences and Technology and the College of Engineering, and the tournament runs for nine months against nine other finalist teams for real prize money.
The Team #
Lion-0xA is Md (Mohammed) Toufikuzzaman, Tianrong Zhang, Chaewan Chun, Durva Dev, Owen Dransfield, Ali Al-Lawati, Jason Lucas, Tanishka Mali, Jiaxi Yang, and me — a genuinely cross-disciplinary group, which has been half the fun of it. Being selected from hundreds of submissions worldwide to be one of ten global finalists is a huge honor for the program, and I’m looking forward to sharing more as the tournament progresses over the next several months.