24 septembre 2024 | International, Terrestre
Lithuania and Northrop Grumman unite for ammo production
Lithuania and Northrop Grumman have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) aimed at promoting industrial cooperation.
4 janvier 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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3 décembre 2020 | International, Terrestre
JLTV: New $911M Order Strengthens Oshkosh’s Hand For Recompete
With 9,500 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles already delivered, the Army was running out of room on its existing contracts, so it just ordered another 2,738 from Oshkosh. That'll keep production going through a re-competition scheduled for 2022. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on December 02, 2020 at 4:49 PM WASHINGTON: The Army's already shared Oshkosh's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle design with rival companies, who hope to take over the program when a new competition is held in 2022. But, having announced a new $911 million order just yesterday, Oshkosh Defense is confident that it'll fend off all challengers and keep building JLTVs for years to come, general manager George Mansfield told me this morning. “This contract really shows how the Joint Program Office feels about Oshkosh,” Mansfield said. “They're very confident we build a good quality product, [and] we are on time and under budget so far.” In fact, Mansfield said, Oshkosh JLTVs were coming in so much under budget that the military was able to buy more vehicles in less time than the original contract anticipated. (And it did so despite cuts to the JLTV budget in recent years). That's why the Army — which runs JLTV on behalf of all the US armed services and seven foreign customers from Belgium to Brazil — had to issue the new contract this fall. You see, in 2015, when Oshkosh beat aerospace titan Lockheed Martin and Humvee manufacturer AM General, the Army issued a production contract with a maximum value of $6.7 billion and a maximum quantity of 16,901 vehicles. That contract was supposed to last eight years, through 2022. Before it ran out, the Army would hold a new competition, open to all comers, with the winner – perhaps Oshkosh, perhaps a rival – getting a new contract to build JLTVs after 2022. But Oshkosh kept selling JLTVs more cheaply than the 2015 contract had assumed. That meant the military could buy more vehicles more quickly, even with a reduced budget for JLTV. That meant, in turn, that it ran up against the 2015 contract's 16,901-vehicle maximum this fall, two years ahead of schedule. So, to keep production going, the Army issued the new contract: an additional $911 million for 2,738 more JLTVs, plus 1,001 trailers and other kit. That brings the total on order to 18,073 JLTVs, of which over half – about 9,500 – have already been delivered. What does a JLTV cost? That's tricky. Oshkosh doesn't divulge exact prices. The government's estimated Average Procurement Unit Cost per JLTV is $395,000 (once adjusted for inflation; it's $365,000 in 2015 dollars). If you just divide the dollar value of the new contract by the number of vehicles, the average cost per JLTV has fallen below $333,000. But the actual price per JLTV is actually a lot lower than that, because these contracts always include trailers, specialized mission equipment for different JLTV variants, spare parts and support. The new contract allows the Army to order additional JLTVs through November 2023. That keeps production going through the re-competition, which is scheduled to award a contract in the second half of 2022. Now, the re-compete is not about picking a new design. Instead, it's about giving the Army the option to pick a new manufacturer for the existing design. Under the terms of the original 2015 contract, the government bought the Technical Data Package that shows you how to build a JLTV and can give that data to any company it likes. In fact, several potential competitors have not only gotten the data package, they've actually leased JLTVs so they can reverse-engineer them. But while competitors now have the JLTV design, they don't have Oshkosh's facilities, workforce or their years of experience actually building it. “We've been manufacturing this vehicle for five years,” Mansfield told me. “We know how it's designed because we designed it, we know how to manufacture it, we've got a strong supply base. So I think we're in a very good position.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/12/jltv-new-911m-order-strengthens-oshkoshs-hand-for-recompete
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12 mars 2024 | International, Naval
Fincantieri and the Qatar Emiri Naval Forces: strategic alliance for naval education & training
The Group and the Qatar Emiri Naval Forces signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Doha.