Middlebury Team Makes Finals of National Anti-Extremism Competition

But one group of Institute students pulled off a lot more than that. During the fall semester, their first accomplishment was fully developing an interactive AI tool that helps people reach loved ones drifting toward conspiracies and extremism.

Not only that—they made the finals of Invent2Prevent, an annual competition including 18 teams from some of the best colleges and universities across the country, all presenting their own projects mitigating extremism.

Invent2Prevent is an initiative of the McCain Institute, EdVenture Partners, Credence Management Solutions, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships.

Students Kojin Glick, Amanda Morton, Kathleen Rabe, and David Santana rolled out to Washington, D.C., in January, representing their 14 teammates from the fall course Countering Violent Extremism with Professor Jason Blazakis, director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism.

“Because it was a national competition, the stakes were high,” Rabe says. “We were competing against these other bright minds, which really brought us together. I loved working as part of a team.”

In the end, Middlebury’s group finished second in the entire U.S., the second time a team from Middlebury Institute has made it to the finals. The original competitors even developed their own nonprofit from their project and earned a $700,000 grant from the DHS. 

Rabe, who’s studying international policy and development with concentrations in French and financial crime management, served as project lead. She introduced Project Gravity to the panel of judges in D.C. with a story she characterized as “hard to tell, but more common than you might think.”

She described having a friend barrel down a QAnon rabbit hole amid COVID. She chose to disconnect, but acknowledged on stage she wished she had the tools “to connect compassionately.”

“We created Project Gravity to bring our loved ones back to Earth,” she said. “And we created Soft Landing GPT to make it a soft landing.”

Project Gravity focuses on the “easiest ways to have the hardest conversations” and “develop and nurture real community resilience” by way of 1) research on everything from countering conspiracy theories to belief change, and 2) the artificial intelligence–driven conversation coach. The chat tool is not currently publicly available while the team works to raise more funding. 

Morton, who is studying nonproliferation and terrorism, contributed as Middlebury’s research lead. As part of the D.C. presentation, she pointed out that more people have died from mass shootings in the last 10 years than the previous 50 and that nearly half of mass shooters—who often participate in conspiracy networks—tell someone about their plan for violence.

“American students go to school every day wondering if they’ll be the next mass shooting victim,” she says. “The best part of the I2P experience was seeing younger generations take creative action to prevent violence in their communities.”

Santana, who is also studying nonproliferation and terrorism with specializations in financial crime management and the Russian language, guided the group’s marketing. He feels the project epitomizes the Middlebury aim to turn theoretical into the practical. 

“I thought [the class] was going to take the traditional route: attend lectures, write midterm and final papers, have presentations—you know, all the things that a normal class usually does,” he says. “This was not the case at Middlebury. We used what we have learned in nonproliferation and terrorism studies, and we got enmeshed into the field of preventing targeted violence.”

More than anything, though, he thrived on the team vibes.

“We had a lot of great chemistry, and I felt that this team was able to pull off the impossible,” he said.