January 22, 2019 | International, Land
Rheinmetall and BAE Systems today announced that they have signed an agreement to create a joint UK based military vehicle design, manufacturing and support business.
The new Joint Venture will be headquartered at BAE Systems' facility in Telford, England and will sustain over 400 jobs in the UK, as well as preserve key technology and engineering skills.
Rheinmetall will purchase a 55% stake in the existing BAE Systems UK based combat vehicles business, with BAE Systems retaining 45%. The establishment of the new Joint Venture is subject to regulatory approvals which are anticipated to be completed in the first half of 2019. Once the approvals have been completed, the Joint Venture will be known as Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land (RBSL).
In addition to managing and growing the existing combat vehicle support business, the intent is for the new Joint Venture to play a major role in the delivery of the British Army's new Mechanised Infantry Vehicle (MIV) and other strategic combat vehicles programmes.
The combination of Rheinmetall's military vehicles technology and products with the additional capabilities and products brought to the Joint Venture by BAE Systems, such as Trojan, Terrier, Warrior, military bridging and the AS90 self-propelled artillery system will create a European market leader in the military vehicle sector. RBSL will have the potential to create hundreds of additional UK jobs, both in Telford and the wider supply chain. While initially focused on these major UK programmes, RBSL will also form an integral part of Rheinmetall's Vehicle Systems Division and will participate in and contribute to various global military vehicle pursuits and contracts.
Jennifer Osbaldestin, Managing Director of BAE Systems Land UK business, said: “We are committed to evolving our combat vehicles business so that we better serve our customers' future interests. Joining forces with Rheinmetall in the UK provides renewed purpose for our vehicles business and allows us to deliver products, services and technology that help land forces excel in their vital roles. We look forward to working together to ensure the Joint Venture is a trusted supplier to the British Army and our international customers.”
Ben Hudson, Global Head of Rheinmetall's Vehicle Systems Division, said: “We are excited about the potential the new Joint Venture holds for Rheinmetall, BAE Systems and ultimately our customers. The combined capabilities of our two great companies will offer our customers a comprehensive portfolio of military vehicles and associated technologies both now and into the future. We are proud to invest in the UK and expect to substantially grow the current business and the Telford manufacturing facility over the coming years.”
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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. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-01-04