June 17, 2022 | International, Land
Lithuania's defense minister heads to Paris to buy Caesar howitzers
The new weapons are to boost Lithuania's artillery capacities, which currently rely on the country's 155mm PzH 2000 howitzers.
January 4, 2019 | International, C4ISR
DARPA: Generating Actionable Understanding of Real-World Phenomena with AI
DARPA seeks to develop schema-based AI capability to enhance reasoning about complex world events and generate actionable insights
Rapid comprehension of world events is critical to informing national security efforts. These noteworthy changes in the natural world or human society can create significant impact on their own, or may form part of a causal chain that produces broader impact. Many events are not simple occurrences but complex phenomena composed of a web of numerous subsidiary elements – from actors to timelines. The growing volume of unstructured, multimedia information available, however, hampers uncovering and understanding these events and their underlying elements.
“The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said Dr. Boyan Onyshkevych, a program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O).
The use of schemas to help draw correlations across information isn't a new concept. First defined by cognitive scientist Jean Piaget in 1923, schemas are units of knowledge that humans reference to make sense of events by organizing them into commonly occurring narrative structures. For example, a trip to the grocery store typically involves a purchase transaction schema, which is defined by a set of actions (payment), roles (buyer, seller), and temporal constraints (items are scanned and then payment is exchanged).
To help uncover complex events found in multimedia information and bring them to the attention of system users, DARPA created the Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas (KAIROS) program. KAIROS seeks to create a schema-based AI capability to enable contextual and temporal reasoning about complex real-world events in order to generate actionable understanding of these events and predict how they will unfold. The program aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data, helping to inform or create broad narratives about the world around us.
KAIROS' research objectives will be approached in two stages. The first stage will focus on creating schemas from large volumes of data by detecting, classifying and clustering sub-events based on linguistic inference and common sense reasoning. Researchers taking on this challenge will apply generalization, composition and specialization processes to help generate schemas that describe both simple and complex events, sequence multiple schemas together to understand key contextual elements like roles and timelines, and apply domain-specific knowledge to tailor the analysis for a particular need.
The second stage of the program will focus on applying the library of schemas created during stage one to multimedia, multi-lingual information to uncover and extract complex events. This stage will require identifying events and entities, as well as relationships among them to help construct and extend a knowledge base.
DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on January 9, 2019 from 10:00am to 2:30pm (EST) at the Holiday Inn at Ballston, 4610 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22203 to provide more information about KAIROS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details of the event, including registration requirements, visit https://www.schafertmd.com/darpa/i2o/KAIROS/pd/.
A Broad Agency Announcement that fully describes the program structure and objectives can be found here, https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=0fc6d1a237556c5d59847e7165af3aef&tab=core&_cview=1.
Image Caption: This image outlines the two stages of the KAIROS program. The first stage will focus on creating a library of schemas from large volumes of data by detecting, classifying and clustering sub-events based on linguistic inference and common sense reasoning. The second stage will apply those schemas to new information to uncover and extract complex events, as well as relationships among them, to help construct and extend a knowledge base.
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July 3, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
US spy planes are breaking down ― and lawmakers want answers
By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― America's aging C-135 reconnaissance planes keep breaking down, and alarmed lawmakers want the U.S. Air Force to tell them why. Based at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, the 55th Wing's Boeing-made reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering aircraft, all more than 50 years old, are meant to carry out critical missions from operating bases in England, Greece, Japan and Qatar. But an Omaha World-Herald investigative series has found that mechanical problems plague the jets, cutting short 500 of their flights since 2016 and one of every 12 missions since 2015. That's prompted Nebraska lawmakers to write to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, urging her to probe and report on the health of the 55th Wing's worn-out fleet. Meanwhile, the Nebraska delegation is trying to fend off an effort within Congress to strip funding to recapitalize the OC-135, which conducts overflights of Russia under the 34-nation Open Skies Treaty. Some lawmakers and Pentagon officials have grown skeptical of the treaty, which allows reciprocal surveillance flights, amid alleged Russian violations, but the administration has requested funds for two new airliners to take over the mission. “It has one of the worst maintenance rates in the United States Air Force,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said of the OC-135 on the House floor last week. “It frequently breaks down in Russia, putting us in very hostile, awkward situations with Russians at their bases.” The chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee's Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Deb Fischer, led the letter with Sen. Ben Sasse, a SASC member; Bacon (a retired brigadier general and former 55th Wing commander who sits on the House Armed Services Committee), as well as Reps. Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith. The letter asked Wilson to report on the 55th Wing's safety, security and continued mission effectiveness as well as the Air Force's long-term plans to sustain and recapitalize the wing's capabilities. It referenced the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint, RC-135S Cobra Ball, RC-135U Combat Sent, WC-135 Constant Phoenix, TC-135 Rivet Joint Trainer and the OC-135 Open Skies aircraft. In the current budget season, House and Senate lawmakers have taken divergent approaches to the Trump administration's $222 million request for the two new aircraft. House appropriators and authorizers stripped the funding from their 2019 bills. The authorization bill withholds the funding until Russia adheres to the treaty and agrees to extradite Russians indicted for meddling in U.S. elections in 2016. Fischer helped ensure the Senate-passed 2019 authorization bill did include funding for OC-135 recapitalization, and the bill will have to be reconciled with its House counterpart. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis directed the Air Force to recapitalize the aircraft. He wrote to Fischer in May to acknowledge that unplanned maintenance issues meant the U.S. completed only 64 percent of its scheduled overflights in 2017, while Russia typically completes all of its scheduled overflights. The White House Office of Management and Budget has also issued letters objecting to the absence of OC-135 recapitalization funding in the House bills. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2018/07/02/us-spy-planes-are-breaking-down-and-lawmakers-want-answers/
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December 16, 2021 | International, Aerospace
China now has the world's 3rd-largest aviation force. Here are the combat jets it's using to catch up with the West.
China's air force and navy now field roughly 2,250 dedicated combat aircraft, and it's "rapidly catching up to Western air forces," the Pentagon says.