URJC students win the II National Cyber League of the Civil Guard

Five students from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) have won the II National Cyber League, a cybersecurity and homeland security competition organized by the Guardia Civil to highlight university talent.

The aim of this competition is to “promote a true culture of cybersecurity” to address the threats facing society in the cyber environment, as well as to visualize and capture the talent of young people, enhance it and encourage teamwork, highlights the URJC in a note.

The winners of this edition were Raúl Martín Santamaría, Sergio Pérez Peló, Isaac Lozano Osorio and Javier Yuste Moure, four PhD students at the URJC, accompanied by Jakub Jan Luczyn, a double degree student also at the University, who joined together in the ‘Heappies’ team.

Most of the team is part of the GRAFO research group, belonging to the URJC School of Computer Engineering, and have participated in the CYNAMON Cybersecurity, Network Analysis and Monitoring for the next generation Internet ministry project.

In the competition, in which 700 students participated, they had to demonstrate that they are capable of resolving a real incident and were assessed on technical ability, regulatory compliance, crisis communication, collaborative awareness and the defense of the work before an evaluation panel.

In the qualifying phase, the more than 700 participants have to overcome a series of technical, legal and communication challenges in two hours.

With each test the teams get a series of points and those with the highest scores will go on to the semifinal.

In this phase the time to solve the problems is four hours and the result of the exercise divided by the time used to obtain the position of each participating group is taken into account.

In the final test they have to solve complications of legal, technical, communicational and collaborative awareness modality and, the finalists, have to present their results to a Tribunal who awards 20% of the qualification.

This is the second time that members of ‘Heappies’ have participated in the National Cyber League - last year they failed to qualify for the semi-final stage.

“Cybersecurity seems to us to be a cutting-edge field, where the competitions are a lot of fun, and since then we have been competing in most of the competitions in which we can participate,” says Isaac Lozano, one of the team members, who has won a study trip to Shenzhen and nearly 6,000 euros in computer equipment.

Isaac Lozano-Osorio
Isaac Lozano-Osorio
Artificial Intelligence Phd Student

Isaac Lozano graduated with a double degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Engineering from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, where he was awarded the prize for the Best Final Project. Subsequently, he completed a Master in Artificial Intelligence Research (UIMP). His main research interests are focused on the interface between Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research. Most of his publications deal with the development of metaheuristic procedures for graph modeled optimization problems.