Team Dragon Radio, representing Drexel faculty and students in the College of Engineering (COE) and the College of Computing and Informatics (CCI), placed eighth globally in the DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). SC2 is the world's first collaborative machine intelligence competition to overcome spectrum scarcity and requires teams to work at the intersection of radio, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Participating teams include academic, industrial, and independent teams from all over the world.
With their placement, Team Dragon Radio qualifies for a special run-off competition in early January to compete for a $375,000 prize.
Dr. Kapil Dandekar, Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), serves as the leader of Team Dragon Radio, which also includes Professor Geoffrey Mainland of CCI's Computer Science department, Professor Steven Weber of ECE, ECE student Alex Lackpour, as well as other graduate students and undergraduate students in the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program who work in the Drexel Wireless Systems Lab. Team Dragon Radio is currently supported by the National Science Foundation, and is also seeking other corporate and private sponsors.
Team Dragon Radio has also qualified for the competition in next year's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge event to be held in October 2019 at the Mobile World Congress Americas (MWCA) annual conference, one of the largest gatherings of the wireless telecommunications community in the United States. There is a $2 million prize at stake in the final stage of this competition; Team Dragon Radio is actively recruiting students and faculty who are interested in machine learning and software defined radio to consider joining their team.