FireFly Intel
National Security Hackathon (by Army xTech)Firefly Intel is on-device tactical sensor fusion for the dismounted soldier. It runs entirely on the tablet the operator already carries, fusing EO, IR, RADAR, and RF feeds into a single threat picture in red, yellow, and green. The problem: a soldier in the field cannot trust single-modality sensors because modern adversaries deploy multispectral decoys that fool thermal and camera sensors, while the real attack comes from another vector. He also cannot send raw video back to base; bandwidth is too small, and latency is too long. He has to decide alone, in seconds. Firefly catches decoys through cross-modal disagreement: when EO and IR confirm a target but RF is silent where it should be loud, the system flags a likely spoof. A quantized Phi-3-mini language model runs locally for plain-English drone tasking, and the same quantized model runs on the drone, so the tablet and drone communicate in kilobytes of metadata, not gigabytes of raw video. Cursor-on-Target XML to TAK. No cloud, no uplink, sub-second decisions. Prototyped under the SFARS program with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). Built through Hacking 4 Defense at Florida Atlantic University.
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