TUE 27/10 9AM-10AM AEDT - HACKATHON KICK-OFF SESSION with Jose V. Benavides and Tom Soderstrom

Attendees:

Jose V. Benavides (NASA), Tom Soderstrom (AWS), Liesl Yearsley (Akin CEO), Neesam Jeffers (Akin CIO), Hackathon Participants

Jose is currently the Project Manager of the NASA International Space Station (ISS) Astrobee Facility project. In conjunction with the prior platform, SPHERES , the Astrobee Facility is one of the most used and popular ISS National Lab Facilities with over 80 on-board test sessions and 400+ hours of Facility Console activities involving crew. He has a bachelors and masters degree from Arizona State University in Electrical Engineering, with specialization in control systems. His hobbies include reading, hiking, dancing, and computer networking.

Tom is currently the Director of Lead Architects at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Tom also worked as the IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was responsible for looking into the future to see what game changing technologies are on the horizon and then testing and evaluating the ones that look the most promising for JPL and NASA. He has worked at small startups and global companies and has been at JPL for a total of 25 years.

Session format:

9:00AM-9:05AM Welcoming message from Liesl/Neesam

9:05AM-9:25AM Speech by Jose V. Benavides

9:25AM-9:35AM Liesl and Neesam talk about Akin, Ai and Robotics

9:35AM-9:55AM Speech by Tom Soderstrom

9:55AM-10:00AM Q&A for Hackathon Teams

Expectations:

Hackathon Participants are briefed about the expectations and are provided with the specs to proceed with the challenge. All hackathon team representatives must be present.