Hacking for Defense (H4D) Meet Team ArgusNet

Turning Satellite Chaos into Clear Paths for Crisis Response

Ten years ago, H4D launched as an audacious classroom experiment – today it’s a global movement solving national security problems, creating startups, powering jobs, and cutting-edge national-security tech. To celebrate a decade of impact, we’re profiling this spring’s Stanford cohort. We first explored Team Hydra Strike (re-thinking torpedoes) and Team OmniComm (rewiring satellite comms). Now we zoom in on Team ArgusNet, whose mission is to give commanders a real-time, all-seeing picture of roads, bridges and ports when crises erupt.

Challenge — “Swift Routes, Swift Aid”

Under NGA-28 from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), ArgusNet is analyzing an array of sprawling satellite imagery and open-source feeds to determine how to turn all of it into trusted infrastructure assessments for first responders in minutes, not hours. Whether routing supply convoys in Haiti or relief trucks after a Florida hurricane, their AI-driven pipeline aims to surface passable routes, viable ports, and identify choke points fast enough to save lives and speed logistics.

Team ArgusNet Members: ArgusNet takes its name from Argus Panoptes, the hundred-eyed sentinel of Greek myth, symbolizing their goal of fusing “eyes” from every sensor into a single, actionable picture. Team members include:

Together these five teammates blend civil-engineering rigor, machine-learning prowess, user-centered design, product discipline, and policy savvy—exactly what NGA needs to slash analysis time and keep commanders moving.

Early Insights from the Field

After 100+ interviews with NGA analysts, search and rescue teams, humanitarian NGOs, and commercial-imagery providers, ArgusNet distilled six core pain points:

1. Verification, not collection, eats the clock. Analysts spend 70% of crisis response clicking through raw scenes.

2. Image overload floods teams. High-revisit LEO satellites combined with large areas of interest firehose data faster than humans can triage.

3. Context beats coordinates. Disaster type, response timing, available assets, and political support all impact routability in crisis zones.

4. Trust demands provenance. Policy makers won’t act on opaque outputs—every insight must be auditable.

5. Data silos strangle speed. GIS shapefiles, weather feeds, and HUMINT remain unlinked.

6. Edge delivery is vital. Deployed analysts often work on low-bandwidth links; models must compress and sync offline.

ArgusNet’s Working Hypothesis: “AI-enabled, provenance-tracked geospatial aggregation pipelines that fuse commercial imagery, open-source data, and historical records can cut route-analysis time from hours to minutes—delivering trusted mobility corridors for commanders and aid planners in any contested theater.”

See Them in Action: Watch Team ArgusNet – and seven other H4D teams – present live on Tuesday, June 3, at 5:15 p.m. PT. You can attend in-person at Stanford University or watch via livestream. RSVP to reserve your spot and get the virtual livestream details HERE.

The Hacking for Defense (H4D) program has been taught at 70 colleges and universities around the world and has created 72 startups that have generated 660 jobs and raised more than $350 million. To learn more about the H4D course at Stanford University visit h4d.stanford.edu; to learn more about H4D around the world visit h4d.us. To learn more about The Hacking for Defense® Manual by Jeff Decker, PhD, visit Amazon.