September 9, 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Jill Aitoro
The Pentagon's needs one central hub to manage all of the data supporting artificial intelligence across the services — and the newly stood-up Joint Artificial Intelligence Center should be the entity to take that on, said Steve Walker, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
DARPA has funded foundational AI work for 56 years, now concentrating on what Walker calls third wave AI that focuses on human and machine interaction as well as building “trust and explainability” of the data, Walker said during a panel discussion at the Defense News Conference on Sept. 4.
“Everybody should own it, but I think there's a real need in [the Department of Defense] to understand how to do what we call AI engineering,” he said. “We can do the foundational part, the research, but who's going to manage the data? Who's going to update the data as it changes? Who's going to update the algorithms as the data changes?
"I know that the Joint AI Center has stood up in the department. I've encouraged them to take that on for all of DoD and all the services. I think that would be an excellent role for them.”
Established in June 2018, the Joint AI Center is an effort to accelerate the Pentagon's adoption and integration of AI at scale. As a center of excellence, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, JAIC's director, said the organization was intended to expand beyond product delivery to include “strategic engagement and policy, plans and analysis, and intelligence and more.” It's been billed as a clearing house for organizing the DoD's thinking and projects related to AI.
That said, it's too soon to know whether JAIC will take Walker's advice and serve as a central manager of sorts for AI data; he did say leadership seemed “amenable” to the idea.
A centralized hub for data could also ease efforts underway by agencies. The Air Force has people plugged in with the JAIC effort, as well as DARPA and academic institutions. The service is starting an AI accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where members of the Air Force are embedding with the university's computer science and AI lab.
“We're trying to make it real, to take some of what Dr. Walker and his team had been working on and turn it into something that our airmen out in the field can use across the spectrum,” said Gen. Stephen “Seve” Wilson, Air Force vice chief of staff. “Whether you're logistics, whether you're an operator, whether you're space. I would make it real.”
At the end of the day, successful AI efforts are based on big data sets. Without that underlying data, the Pentagon is “building a house on sand,” said Juliana Vida, the chief technical adviser for the public sector at Splunk, Inc.
“If you don't get the foundation right, the input into the machine-learning algorithm is not going to be complete. It's not going to be correct. Even though it's not cool and it doesn't go bang and it's not sexy, the data is the underlying piece to all of these other technologies,” Vida said.
June 22, 2023 | International, Aerospace
Nexter, EOS et TRAAK ont remporté l’appel à projet pour Larinae, un drone multi mission capable d'effectuer une mission de reconnaissance et traiter une cible. Ils ont 18 mois pour développer un démonstrateur.
November 30, 2024 | International, Aerospace
September 10, 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Heiko Borchert und Christian Brandlhuber As the United States, China and Russia are accelerating their use of artificial intelligence in military settings, Europe risks falling behind unless leaders on the continent take steps to bundle their efforts. Estonia, Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands presented a food-for-thought paper in May 2019, posing a series of questions aimed at boosting defense-relevant AI research in Europe. Our suggestion: Create a data mobility framework that would guide future concepts, models, algorithms, data sharing, access to elastic computing power, and sophisticated testing and training. Key challenges have yet to be addressed. Among them is a solid conceptual framework to help underline the benefits for armed forces. Second, AI solutions need to be integrated into a complex web of legacy systems, which puts a premium on interoperability. Third, defense AI solutions must comply with legal requirements. Finally, Europe lacks a common, trusted defense data pool. European leaders should take a lesson from the military mobility project, which simplifies and standardizes cross-border military transport procedures to ease the movement of personnel and equipment. Europe needs to match physical mobility with digital mobility. Data needs to travel, too. To stimulate defense AI solutions, the continent needs a platform economy that emerges around a portfolio of relevant infrastructure elements and services that a new “Center for Defense AI” could build. For the platform to become attractive, the data acquisition strategy must focus on the need to share. Readiness to share must be incentivized by a data pool that offers true, added value. Therefore, the center would offer access to data on anything from missile defense to combat aircraft maintenance under strict, government-controlled regulation, enabling users to build novel use cases for military scenarios. Mission-critical systems cannot rely on a single machine-learning technology but require a combined approach to data fusion that increases reliability and reflects the specific requirements of the different domains like land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. In addition, data must be validated to avoid manipulation. This data pool would become enormously attractive if the center managed to establish arrangements with the European Union and NATO to share data collected in international operations. This would provide an unprecedented opportunity to develop future concepts, models and algorithms based on real-life data reflecting mission requirements, environmental conditions in different theaters of operation and adversarial behavior. In addition, the European Defence Agency and NATO's Science and Technology Organization should make use of the joint data pool for their defense AI projects, thus expanding the data pool as well as the concepts and models used for data curation and solutions development. With the help of the European Defence Fund, the center could establish the first European defense data pool spanning across military services, missions and domains. This will drastically reduce data-handling costs, as data curation activities required for every single defense AI project can be pooled. While hugely important, data is only a means to develop capabilities-based AI solutions. That's why the center would offer complementary services addressing two current shortfalls: First, commonly available computing capacity required for large-scale learning is somewhat novel to the defense industry. A new defense AI cloud would significantly enhance data mobility by offering elastic computing capacity up to supercomputer levels, and dedicated data fusion capabilities currently unavailable to train very large-scale, AI-based data fusion models. Second, the center could provide a sophisticated simulation environment to run AI operations in a realistic battlefield environment. Based on its trusted data sources, the center and defense AI developers could join forces to build a defense AI app store. Apps could capture different sensor and effector characteristics or emulate particular patterns of adversarial behavior. Defense contractors and defense procurement agencies could use these apps to verify and validate new AI systems as if they had access to the respective algorithms, but without exposing the original vendor to the risk of being reverse engineered. In addition, the simulation environment would be instrumental to assess the ethical, legal and societal impact of AI solutions, thus providing a sound basis to decide on the use of AI systems and to enhance live, virtual, constructive training solutions. Europe should take bold steps toward channeling its collaborative defense AI activities, building on the strengths of each partner: The center would offer joint services; defense AI developers could concentrate on designing and producing intelligent sensors, effectors and decision-making solutions, while military end-users would contribute capabilities-based thinking and operational experience. Heiko Borchert runs Borchert Consulting & Research, a strategic affairs consultancy based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Christian Brandlhuber is senior adviser at Reply, a European IT systems integrator, and coordinates the company's AI strategy and activities. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2019/09/09/jump-starting-europes-work-on-military-artificial-intelligence/