Student Events

PickHacks

PickHacks is a celebration of technology that brings together you and 499 of the brightest minds from around the nation for 36 hours of building, collaboration, and fun. Our mission is to empower students to explore, learn, and create within a supportive and welcoming environment.

Learn more about PickHacks

SIG-Data

DataFest

We participated most recently in DataFest at Mizzou. DataFest is a celebration of data in which teams of undergraduates work "around the clock" to discover and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set. It is a nationally coordinated weekend-long data analysis competition, and challenges students to find their own story to tell with the data that is meaningful to the data donor. 

Learn more about DataFest

SIG-Security

Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)

The Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition provides institutions with an information assurance or computer security curriculum in a controlled, competitive environment to assess their student's depth of understanding and operational competency in managing the challenges inherent in protecting a corporate network infrastructure and business information systems. CCDC competitions ask student teams to assume administrative and protective duties for an existing “commercial” network - typically a small company with 50+ users, 7 to 10 servers, and common Internet services such as a web server, mail server, and e-commerce site. Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on their ability to detect and respond to outside threats,   maintain availability of existing services such as mail servers and web servers, respond to business requests such as the addition or removal of additional services, and balance security needs against business needs. Throughout the competition an automated scoring engine is used to verify the functionality and availability of each team’s services on a periodic basis and traffic generators continuously feed simulated user traffic into the competition network.  A volunteer red team provides the “external threat” all Internet-based services face and allows the teams to match their defensive skills against live opponents.

Learn more about CCDC

Capture the Flag (CTF)

Capture the Flag is a special kind of information security competition.  There are two common types of CTFs: Jeopardy and Attack-Defence. Jeopardy-style CTFs have a few tasks in  a range of categories. Teams gain points for every solved task based on its difficulty. Each task you beat unlocks the next one in the category. The other style of CTF is Attack-Defense. Every team has their own network with vulnerabilities. Your team has time to patch your services and develop exploits, until the wargame begins. Then you must try and attack other servers while defending your own. CTF games often touch on many other aspects of information security: cryptography, steganography, binary analysis, reverse engineering, mobile security and more. If you want to see everything the world of cyber security has to offer, CTFs are the way to go.

Learn more about Upcoming CTF events

Tracer Fire

Tracer Fire is a competition-like training program developed by Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to educate and train cyber-security incident responders, analysts, and university students, in critical skill areas including incident response, forensic investigation, and analysis, file systems, memory layout, and malware analysis. 

Learn more about TracerFire

SIG-Game

MegaMinerAI

MegaMinerAI is a 24-hour artificial intelligence (AI) programming competition hosted each semester by S&T ACM SIG-Game. Competitors must use their 24-hours to develop a program to play a novel game developed by SIG-Game’s development team. The details of the game are kept secret until the day of competition, so competitors must demonstrate their wits and coding skills to develop the best AI!

Learn more about MegaMinerAI