Inspiration
Disaster strikes when you least expect it, and no one is ever really ready. What's more dreadful is the radio silence afterwards: phones without signal, and someone trying to say "Help me" in the chaos.
We thought about the people in Venezuela after the earthquakes, and the families in Sudan caught in the conflict. No one should have to wait in silence, knowing time is a lifeline. That's where Beacon comes in.
What it does
Mesh relay: Messages hop from phone to nearby phone until one with an internet connection carries them out. Dispatch dashboard: Messages arrive at a live dashboard built for dispatchers. Smart triage: The dashboard prioritizes zones based on volunteer responses, and on their absence, so silence becomes a signal too.
How we built it
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was finding an idea that could serve communities across a wide range of situations, from natural disasters to conflict zones. We needed something flexible enough to matter in many emergencies, yet simple enough for anyone to use in a moment of panic. We also struggled to design a logo that anyone, in any culture or language, could instantly connect with safety and relief.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
In this project, we learned how distributed systems work by building a peer-to-peer mesh, where every phone acts as both a sender and a relay with no central server holding the network together. We saw firsthand how messages can find their own path through unreliable, constantly changing connections. We saw NVIDIA Nemotron as the brain behind Beacon, automatically triaging incoming alerts by weighing urgency, location, and silence from volunteers. That same AI could also serve as a dispatch agent, deciding where help should go and coordinating the response in real time, so no signal goes unanswered. Since the app targets everyone with a phone, the design and organization of the app are user-friendly for all ages and experience levels.
