26 novembre 2020 | International, C4ISR
WASHINGTON — A breakthrough in decoding brain signals could be the first step toward a future where soldiers silently communicate during operations.
New research funded by the U.S. Army Research Office successfully separated brain signals that influence action or behavior from signals that do not. Using an algorithm and complex mathematics, the team was able to identify which brain signals were directing motion, or behavior-relevant signals, and then remove those signals from the other brain signals — behavior-irrelevant ones.
“Here we're not only measuring signals, but we're interpreting them,” said Hamid Krim, a program manager for the Army Research Office.
The service wants to get to the point where the machine can provide feedback to soldier's brains to allow them to take corrective action before something takes place, a capability that could protect the health of a war fighter.
Krim pointed to stress and fatigue signals that the brain gives out before someone actually realizes they are stressed or tired, thus letting troops know when they should take a break. The only limit to the possibilities is the imagination, he said.
Another potential future use is silent communication, Krim said. Researchers could build on the research to allow the brain and computers to communicate so soldiers can silently talk via a computer in the field.
“In a theater, you can have two people talking to each other without ... even whispering a word,” Krim said. “So you and I are out there in the theater and we have to ... talk about something that we're confronting. I basically talked to my computer — your computer can be in your pocket, it can be your mobile phone or whatever — and that computer talks to ... your teammate's computer. And then his or her computer is going to talk to your teammate.”
In the experiment, the researchers monitored the brain signals from a monkey reaching for a ball over and over again in order to separate brain signals.
But more work is to be done, as any sort of battle-ready machine-human interface using brain signals is likely decades away, Krim said.
What's next? Researchers will now try to identify other signals outside of motion signals.
“You can read anything you want; doesn't mean that you understand it,” Krim said. “The next step after that is to be able to understand it. The next step after that is to break it down into into words so that ... you can synthesize in a sense, like you learn your vocabulary and your alphabet, then you are able to compose.
“At the end of the day, that is the original intent mainly: to have the computer actually being in a full duplex communication mode with the brain.”
The Army Research Office-backed program was led by researchers at the University of Southern California, with additional U.S. partners at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; Duke University; and New York University. The program also involved several universities in the United Kingdom, including Essex, Oxford and Imperial College. The Army is providing up to $6.25 million in funding over five years.
1 novembre 2021 | International, Terrestre
See the newest tech and hear from leadership in this special episode of Defense News Weekly covers the Association of the U.S. Army conference.
25 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — Michael Brown spent two decades running companies in Silicon Valley, eventually rising to CEO of Symantec, one of the largest software companies in the world, with annual revenues of $4 billion and more than 10,000 employees. On Sept. 24, he starts a new job as the next leader of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit. While it comes with a much smaller budget, in the range of $40 million, it's a job Brown believes he's stepping into at a critical time. “My fundamental view is we are in a technology race. We didn't ask to be in this, but we're in it,” Brown said in an exclusive interview with Defense News. “I'm concerned that if we don't recognize that we're in a race and take appropriate action, then we let China move forward and we don't put our best foot forward in terms of leading in these key technology areas.” Brown spent the last two years as a White House presidential innovation fellow with the Pentagon, meaning he's not coming into the world of defense cold with the DIU job. During that period he met Raj Shah, the previous DIU leader, as well as Mike Griffin, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, who now will be Brown's boss. Brown also co-authored a Pentagon study on China's influence in the U.S. tech scene, an experience that has influenced his views as he prepares to take over DIU. “One of the things I carry with me is I understand the motivation of companies, CEOs, investors because I've been working with these folks my whole life,” he said of his qualifications. Created in 2015 to be the Pentagon's outreach effort to Silicon Valley, DIU — until recentlyknown as the Defense innovation Unit Experimental — has gone through several high-profile iterations. It opened offices in Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, but also worked through two leaders. It went from reporting directly to the secretary of defense to the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The group has also faced questions about its future from skeptical members of Congress, and resistance inside the building. The hiring of Mike Madsen to handle the office's Washington operations is expected to ease those concerns, but Brown acknowledged he would be spending time in Washington every few weeks to shore up internal and external support. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Griffin wanted a leader for the agency with a large commercial background, Brown said, “because that's the community we need to access.” Brown wants to create “the ideal exchange where we have access to all the leading technologies from whatever companies we want to work with on the supply side — and on the demand side we have the effective relationships with the Pentagon, throughout the military, so we can be select about what are the most interesting problems to work on in national security that have the greatest impact.” The China problem Brown's comments on China put him in line with the broader Trump administration, whose officials have repeatedly pointed to China as a competitor, and the Mattis-led Pentagon, which has warned of risk from China both as a military competitor and in influencing American supply chains. DIU, to Brown, has a specific role to play in that race: getting the Pentagon the best commercially available technology, and hence freeing up funding to invest in the military-only capabilities, such as hypersonics, needed to check Chinese ambitions. More nebulous but just as important for Brown is a new mission for DIU: doing outreach into the commercial tech community to explain the Pentagon's views on China, and why contributing to the departments efforts are worthwhile. Or as Brown puts it, “making sure the companies in these innovation hubs are aware of the technology race that is going on, so that they're not only viewing China as an economic opportunity but also seeing the geopolitical consequences. Being part of that debate is going to be an important role for DIU.” Brown said some of DIU's top priorities will include human systems engineering, information technology, cyber or advanced computing, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. He is also ordering a look at the various processes DIU uses to see if areas can be sped up, and whether other transaction authorities are being used to their full potential. He said he did not expect a significant restructuring of the office, but one priority is getting a human resources leader and new general counsel to smooth the transition of future hires. Capt. Sean Heritage, who has been acting as DIU interim head, will return to being the Navy lead for the office. The former CEO acknowledged that his background and high-level ties to the tech community may open doors that would be otherwise be shut (Brown was reportedly forced out by Symantec's board in 2016 due to company numbers, making him the third CEO to be removed by the company in the space of four years). He also envisions working with academic institutions located near the three DIU hubs to encourage a debate on the issue. Part of DIU's role is explaining to companies why they should support the department's efforts. Silicon Valley has a reputation as being hostile to the military — a reputation that has only increased in recent months following an employee-led pullout by Google of the department's Project Maven, an effort to incorporate AI into analyzing drone footage. Brown, however, said those concerns are largely “overblown,” noting the office is already in discussions with well over 500 different tech firms. “We haven't found there's a reluctance on the part of companies developing the technologies we're interested in working with the Pentagon,” he said. “They are interested in how DIU can help make that process easier for them.” Brown thinks he is the man to make that happen. “Contrary to what a lot of folks read or talk about with government, my experience is if you have good ideas and have persistence, you can make that happen.” https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/09/24/former-symantec-boss-takes-over-the-defense-innovation-unit
10 juillet 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Autre défense
By: Valerie Insinna LE BOURGET, France, and WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force has started work on a data architecture for its Advanced Battle Management System, the family of platforms that will eventually replace the E-8C JSTARS surveillance planes. But the “biblical” rule for the program, according to the service's acquisition executive Will Roper, is that “we don't start talking platforms until the end,” he told Defense News at the Paris Air Show in June. “It is so easy to start talking about satellites and airplanes and forget what ABMS is going to have to uniquely champion, which is the data architecture that will connect them,” Roper explained. “I'm actually glad we don't have big money this year because we can't go build a drone or a satellite, so we've got to focus on the part that's less sexy, which is that data architecture,” he said. “We're going to have to do software development at multiple levels of classification and do it securely. All of those are things that are hard to get people energized about, but they're going to be the make-or-break [undertakings] for this program.” Some initial work has begun on identifying the requirements for ABMS data architecture. The service in March named Preston Dunlap, a national security analysis executive at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, as the program's “chief architect.” Dunlap will be responsible for developing the requirements for ABMS and ensuring they are met throughout the menu of systems that will comprise it. The Air Force Warfighter Integration Center, or AFWIC — the service's planning cell for future technologies and concepts of operation — provided feedback to Dunlap about how ABMS should work, Roper said. The Air Force is still deliberating what ABMS will look like in its final form, although officials have said it will include a mix of traditional manned aircraft, drones, space-based technologies and data links. The effort was devised as an alternative to a replacement for the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System. While the service first considered a traditional recapitalization program where it would buy new JSTARS aircraft equipped with more sophisticated radars, leaders ultimately backed the more ambitious ABMS proposal, believing it to be a more survivable capability. But defense companies are hungry for more information about the platforms that will comprise ABMS, seeing the opportunity to develop new systems or upgrade legacy ones as a major potential moneymaker. Once the service has defined an ABMS data architecture — which Roper believes will occur before the fiscal 2021 budget is released — it will need to form requirements for the data that will run through and populate it as well as the artificial intelligence that automatically sorts important information and passes it to users. “Maybe one sensor needs to be able to fill a gap that others are creating,” he said. “We're going to have to look at requirements at a systems level and tell satellites that you need to be able to provide this level of data at this refresh rate. UAVs, you need to be able to do this rate and so on and so forth. Once we do that, then we'll be in the traditional part of the acquisition, which will be building those satellites, building those UAVs.” The Air Force intends to conduct yearly demonstrations throughout this process, the first of which will involve “ad hoc mesh networking,” which will allow platforms to automatically begin working together and sharing information without human interference. By FY21, full-scale prototyping could start, he said. In the commercial sector, where devices can be seamlessly linked and monitored over the internet, this concept is known as the internet of things. But that construct — where companies build technologies from the get-go with open software — is difficult to replicate in the defense world, where firms must meet strict security standards and are protective of sharing intellectual property that could give competitors an edge. “Openness in the internet of things makes sense because you can monetize the data,” Roper said. “That's not going to exist for us, so we're going to have to have a contracting incentive that replicates it. The best theory we have right now is some kind of royalty scheme that the more open you are and the more adaptation we do on top of your system, the more you benefit from it.” The service wants to hold a series of industry days to see whether such a construct would be appealing to defense companies, and how to structure it so that it will be fair and profitable. One unanswered is how to incentivize and compensate defense firms that build in new software capability. “If you create the system that allows us to put 100 apps on top of it, you benefit differently than if we can only put one. But the details are going to be difficult because maybe that one app is super important,” Roper said. “But if we can't replicate profit and cash flow on which their quarterlies depend, then they're going to have to go back to the old model of saying they are for open [architecture] but secretly giving you closed.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/paris-air-show/2019/07/09/rule-no1-for-air-forces-new-advanced-battle-management-system-we-dont-start-talking-platforms-until-the-end/