D3P “Hackathon” Sparks Innovation

Ingenuity was on full display in March as students from Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Georgetown, Georgia Tech, and other leading universities pitched ideas to prevent or reduce malicious cyber attacks. Their proposals were part of Defending Digital Democracy’s first Information Operations Technical and Policy Hackathon and the culmination of a D3P conference dedicated to fortifying election security. 

Winnona DeSombre and Gabriella Roncone, computer science students from Tufts, claimed the grand prize of $10,000 for their development of Sanity Check, an app that identifies information operations and unverifiable information over social media. 

“What’s important is that—from a user side—individuals understand where their information is coming from, while social media companies can understand how their platform is being used for information operations and create risk rules accordingly,” DeSombre said. 

“What I find to be so cool about this is the patterns,” Roncone said. “There’s no single red flag that marks something as illegitimate or legitimate. A single risk rule alone means nothing, but together they highlight real components of information operations.”