About the Challenge
The ACtech Challenge is a simulation-based competition in which teams of graduate students take on the roles of senior professionals inside an organization or institution facing a fast-moving crisis created by advanced technology. They are tasked with advising that institution’s leadership in real time. Student teams receive a case file containing a closed set of records a real organization would have during a nascent crisis such as internal documents, outside reports, press coverage, and regulatory correspondence. The students must work out what happened, what is at stake, what their organization should do, and the order of priority for such actions. The competition culminates in a two-day in-person event where students will present their findings and recommendations to the organization’s leadership and respond to additional developments to the crisis on the ground.
2027 Fordham Law ACtech Challenge
The inaugural competition will take place in April 2027 in partnership with Fordham University School of Law in New York City, gathering students from a wide spectrum of fields to focus on the intersection of law and emerging technologies.
Competition Resources
Competition Structure
In addition to the formal competition rounds, the two-day event will include programming designed to deepen student learning and professional engagement such as keynote sessions, workshops, panel discussions, and networking events.
The Roles Students Take On
Each team member occupies a named seat on a cross-functional working group that advises the client’s senior leadership—typically a board committee or an executive crisis team. The seats change with the scenario, but they are drawn from the functions a real institution would convene:
Each seat will see the problem from a different institutional vantage point, with different incentives communicated to them in information packets unique to their role. Each seat will also have different blind spots. Thus, the team has to argue its way to a single position based on different, sometimes even conflicting, pieces of information and perspectives, rather than average its members’ views or concede to any given one.
Learning Objectives
Presented By
The Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative, part of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs, works at the nexus of geopolitics and cybersecurity to craft strategies to help shape the conduct of statecraft and to better inform and secure users of technology.
Also from the Cyber Statecraft Initiative
The Cyber Statecraft Initiative’s Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge is an annual cyber policy and strategy competition where students from across the globe compete in developing policy recommendations tackling a fictional cyber catastrophe.