Stony Brook University Technology and Society

We are absolutely thrilled to share some wonderful news and a deeply proud moment for our department!

Team OptimiPrime—composed entirely of our very own Department of Technology and Society (DTS) students, Sunwoo Han, Sean Kim, and Sunghun Park—has won 1st Place and the Grand Prize at Hackathon The X 2026, held at the Incheon Global Campus. Competing against 14 highly talented groups, our exceptional students truly stood out as the only team proudly representing DTS.

Their winning project, UnitTrace, is a secure macOS-based application perfectly tailored to the hackathon's theme of “Offline to Online” digital transformation. Rather than building a typical consumer app, the team took on a highly specialized and practical challenge: how to safely digitize sensitive paper documents in ultra-high-security environments where the internet, cloud storage, smartphones, and USB drives are strictly banned.

UnitTrace brilliantly bridges this gap by turning scanned documents into encrypted, searchable, and auditable digital records—all running locally on a closed workstation without any public internet access or external APIs.

What makes this victory even more special is how our students seamlessly connected classroom learning with real-world application. One of the students shared that the team directly applied the economic and project management frameworks they learned in EST 392 with Prof. Pennings. Instead of presenting just a technical demo, Team OptimiPrime analyzed UnitTrace as a real-world product, integrating market structure analysis, advanced product differentiation (such as local AES-256 encryption and user watermarks), and a viable defense procurement business model.

While UnitTrace is currently a powerful prototype, this hackathon has beautifully proven that meaningful digital transformation is possible even in the most restricted environments.

Please join us in warmly celebrating Sunwoo, Sean, and Sunghun for their creativity, hard work, and brilliant representation of our department! We could not be prouder of your incredible achievement.