we made it to top 10 for SEDIC 2026

Me and my team, Matcha Latte, just wrapped up the Strategic Electronic Defense Innovation Challenge (SEDIC 2026). We poured our hearts into building Project Guardian, an AI maritime surveillance system and I am so proud to say we made it to the Top 10 Finals in the Visual Track!

We didn't walk away with any prize, but walking away with the knowledge we gained? Priceless.

In just 4+ weeks, we:

• Curated 30,000+ mages of global maritime traffic.
• Fine-tuned an ensemble of YOLO11 models to cross-verify vessel identities (Civilian vs. Military vs. Specific RMN Ships).
• Built a fail-closed system that refuses to guess when it isn't sure, because in defence tech, reliability is everything.
• Added a live-video behavioural tracking pipeline to detect suspicious vessel movements without relying on AIS.

Presenting our tech to actual military officers and industry experts was surreal. They pushed us to think about real-world constraint: What happens in heavy fog? What if the camera is shaking? How do we explain the AIs decision to an operator?

Thank you to my incredible teammates for surviving the dev sprint, the endless training epochs, and the caffeine-fueled debugging sessions. We built a full-stack AI product from scratch, and we held our own on a national stage.