January 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR
By: Charles Romine
Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to grow the economy and improve our lives, but with these benefits, it also brings new risks that society is grappling with. How can we be sure this new technology is not just innovative and helpful, but also trustworthy, unbiased, and resilient in the face of attack? We sat down with NIST Information Technology Lab Director Chuck Romine to learn how measurement science can help provide answers.
One of the challenges with defining artificial intelligence is that if you put 10 people in a room, you get 11 different definitions. It's a moving target. We haven't converged yet on exactly what the definition is, but I think NIST can play an important role here. What we can't do, and what we never do, is go off in a room and think deep thoughts and say we have the definition. We engage the community.
That said, we're using a narrow working definition specifically for the satisfaction of the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, which makes us responsible for providing guidance to the federal government on how it should engage in the standards arena for AI. We acknowledge that there are multiple definitions out there, but from our perspective, an AI system is one that exhibits reasoning and performs some sort of automated decision-making without the interference of a human.
AI systems will need to exhibit characteristics like resilience, security and privacy if they're going to be useful and people can adopt them without fear. That's what we mean by trustworthy. Our aim is to help ensure these desirable characteristics. We want systems that are capable of either combating cybersecurity attacks, or, perhaps more importantly, at least recognizing when they are being attacked. We need to protect people's privacy. If systems are going to operate in life-or-death type of environments, whether it's in medicine or transportation, people need to be able to trust AI will make the right decisions and not jeopardize their health or well-being.
Resilience is important. An artificial intelligence system needs to be able to fail gracefully. For example, let's say you train an artificial intelligence system to operate in a certain environment. Well, what if the system is taken out of its comfort zone, so to speak? One very real possibility is catastrophic failure. That's clearly not desirable, especially if you have the AI deployed in systems that operate critical infrastructure or our transportation systems. So, if the AI is outside of the boundaries of its nominal operating environment, can it fail in such a way that it doesn't cause a disaster, and can it recover from that in a way that allows it to continue to operate? These are the characteristics that we're looking for in a trustworthy artificial intelligence system.
Industry has a remarkable ability to innovate and to provide new capabilities that people don't even realize that they need or want. And they're doing that now in the AI consumer space. What they don't often do is to combine that push to market with deep thought about how to measure characteristics that are going to be important in the future. And we're talking about, again, privacy, security and resilience ... trustworthiness. Those things are critically important, but many companies that are developing and marketing new AI capabilities and products may not have taken those characteristics into consideration. Ultimately, I think there's a risk of a consumer backlash where people may start saying these things are too easy to compromise and they're betraying too much of my personal information, so get them out of my house.
What we can do to help, and the reason that we've prioritized trustworthy AI, is we can provide that foundational work that people in the consumer space need to manage those risks overall. And I think that the drumbeat for that will get increasingly louder as AI systems begin to be marketed for more than entertainment. Especially at the point when they start to operate critical infrastructure, we're going to need a little more assurance.
That's where NIST can come together with industry to think about those things, and we've already had some conversations with industry about what trustworthy AI means and how we can get there.
I'm often asked, how is it even possible to influence a trillion-dollar, multitrillion-dollar industry on a budget of $150 million? And the answer is, if we were sitting in our offices doing our own work independent of industry, we would never be able to. But that's not what we do. We can work in partnership with industry, and we do that routinely. And they trust us, they're thrilled when we show up, and they're eager to work with us.
I think some of this has been overhyped. At the same time, I think it's important to acknowledge that risks are there, and that they can be pretty high if they're not managed ahead of time. For the foreseeable future, however, these systems are going to be too fragile and too dependent on us to worry about them taking over. I think the biggest revolution is not AI taking over, but AI augmenting human intelligence.
We're seeing examples of that now, for instance, in the area of face recognition. The algorithms for face recognition have improved at an astonishing rate over the last seven years. We're now at the point where, under controlled circumstances, the best artificial intelligence algorithms perform on par with the best human face recognizers. A fascinating thing we learned recently, and published in a report, is that if you take two trained human face recognizers and put them together, the dual system doesn't perform appreciably better than either one of them alone. If you take two top-performing algorithms, the combination of the two doesn't really perform much better than either one of them alone. But if you put the best algorithm together with a trained recognizer, that system performs substantially better than either one of them alone. So, I think, human augmentation by AI is going to be the revolution.
I think one of the things that is going to be necessary for us is pulling out the desirable characteristics like usability, interoperability, resilience, security, privacy and all the things that will require a certain amount of care to build into the systems, and get innovators to start incorporating them. Guidance and standards can help to do that.
Last year, we published our plan for how the federal government should engage in the AI standards development process. I think there's general agreement that guidance will be needed for interoperability, security, reliability, robustness, these characteristics that we want AI systems to exhibit if they're going to be trusted.
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/trustworthy-ai-conversation-nists-chuck-romine
November 23, 2023 | International, Aerospace
NATO has warned its members that too much red tape is hindering troop movements across Europe, a problem that could cause major delays were a conflict with Russia to erupt.
July 24, 2020 | International, Land
By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — German tank-maker Krauss-Maffei Wegmann is developing a tactical bridge-launching capability for its Boxer vehicle that the company hopes to sell to its growing customer base. Executives still consider the module an internal prototype, with more testing planned in the coming months. But the premise of a bridge-launching capability in forces lighter than the heavy, tracked vehicles mostly used for that job today could garner interest, they said. The German military, Lithuania, the Netherlands, the U.K. and Australia are current or soon-to-be operators of Boxer fleets. The vehicles were developed in a joint venture with Germany's Rheinmetall. The rides are modular by design, consisting of base chassis that can be combined with payloads for troop transport, command and control, combat, or medical evacuation, for example. The new module will be able to deploy two types of bridges: a heavy variant that spans 14 meters and can carry 80 tons, and a longer version of 22 meters certified for 50 tons. Those weight limits are sufficient for heavy battle tanks and the slightly lighter infantry fighting vehicles, respectively. KMW officials had planned to debut the new development at the Eurosatory expo in Paris, France, last month before organizers canceled the event due to the coronavirus pandemic. The next chance to display the bridging module for would-be clients will be the U.K.-based DVD2020 conference, sponsored by the British Ministry of Defence, in November, according to the company. Modifications needed to operate the bridging module with the base version of the Boxer include a new drive output for siphoning power from the main engine to the hydraulic arms used to push the bridge from the vehicle to the ground, officials explained. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/07/23/germanys-kmw-pitches-bridge-launching-boxer-to-its-customer-base/
July 30, 2020 | International, C4ISR
Andrew Eversden A critical piece of the U.S. Army's network modernization push is ensuring its systems work with allies. In future battles, the Army will not fight alone; it will be joined by coalition partners, as well as other U.S. services. As the Army moves to improve its integrated tactical network, it must ensure that its network tools work with coalition and service partners The Army recently completed a critical design review of Capability Set '21 a set of new network tools that will be delivered to soldiers next year. The service is in the first phase of procuring the new capabilities. A “key factor” involved in delivery to soldiers at the battalion level and below is a move to a 75 percent “secure but unclassified” network that provides improved communication between coalition partners, said Col. Garth Winterle, project manager for tactical radios at the Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical. “We're moving off of an all-secret network to one that's a lot more flexible and actually encourages coalition interoperability,” Winterle said. One opportunity to test interoperability was Defender Europe 2020, which was meant to be one of the largest European exercises involving both the U.S. Army and NATO allies, but had to be scaled down due to the coronavirus pandemic. Still, the Army was able to test interoperability. There were a series of pre-Defender Europe exercises to assess capabilities “to inform future network design,” according to Justine Ruggio, director of communications for the Network Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command. These assessments included several pieces of Capability Set '21, including communications exercises and validation exercises with the Army's fielded Command Post Computing Environment software, Tactical Server Infrastructure and Commercial Coalition Equipment “to enable the use of the Mission Partner Environment, which allowed all participants to share classified information during the exercise, including the Polish and U.K.,” Ruggio said. During the pre-Defender Europe tests, “we were able to bridge the Polish and U.K. unit into an integrated command structure using our secret releasable network and create that common command-and-control picture,” Col. Lesley Kipling, the mission command lead and Army National Guard liaison officer to the Network CFT, said in an interview with C4ISRNET. Secret but releasable information is classified at the secret level and can be released to certain coalition partners who have sufficient clearance from their home country. An exercise scheduled for next year, called Warfighter 21-4, will allow for additional interoperability assessments with U.K. and French forces. According to Ruggio, one focus area will be on interoperability using the Network CFT's DevOps model to iterate the Command Post Computing Environment, continue to assess Commercial Coalition Equipment and evaluate the Mission Partner Environment. The event will be aligned with Capability Set '23, the next iteration of network tools. Kipling added that the cross-functional team and its partners are “continuing” to work on policies and training for properly connecting to a coalition network “so that it's not learning on the fly, but that these procedures and policies are codified in a way that they can be standardized and any user can execute whenever they're put in a situation,” she said. Brig. Gen. Joseph Papenfus, chief Information officer and deputy chief of staff of the G6 of U.S. Army Europe, said that the scaled-back nature of Defender Europe did affect network interoperability testing because soldiers were unable to come over from the United States. That means that U.S. Army Europe will focus heavily on European partners during the smaller exercises, Papenfus said, including validating network integration and establishing a secret but releasable network with NATO. “Every opportunity that we have to see how a piece of equipment works within the larger set of the network, we take advantage of that,” Ruggio said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/yahoo-syndication/2020/07/29/how-army-network-modernization-efforts-ensure-equipment-works-with-allies/