Microsoft, NASA, and students from two HBCUs in the Reston/DC area have completed the maiden mission of a new Microsoft/NASA partnership, STEM Educational Project: AI looking for new Earths. Using methodology developed by The Microsoft Garage over years of running hackathons, in just one month – and while completing their final exams – the student hackers learned and deployed several new technologies, and quite literally reached the stars by showing they could deploy code to the International Space Station. According to Piali Ghose, Director of The Garage Reston/DC and host of the event, "This hackathon amplifies the cultural priorities closest to our hearts here at Microsoft and at The Garage because it allows us to continue fulfilling our stated commitments to making a difference, seeking diversity and being inclusive in our work, bringing multiple teams together as'One Microsoft' while collaborating with federal and academic partners, and doing all of this with a growth mindset." The partnership emerged from a shared goal of fostering the future STEM workforce by exposing university students to science, tools, and expertise "at the intersection of Space Cloud." By structuring the project as a month-long hackathon, participating students learned how real data scientists work as a team to ideate, develop, and validate their work with a proof of concept.

M. Pell (The Microsoft Garage): Surfacing The Invisible Deceptively powerful and stunningly beautiful, this monumental leap forward in conveying the invisible effectively has always been right there in front of us, waiting to be unlocked, hiding in plain sight. All it took was the convergence of human ingenuity, artificial intelligence, and the rise of a medium capable of magic.

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