Deputy Secretary of Defense Hicks Visits Defense Industrial Base Partners and Army Ground

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  13 janvier 2021 | International, C4ISR

  Rafaut acquiert Secapem

  DEFENSE Rafaut acquiert Secapem Rafaut vient d'acquérir Secapem, une PME innovante spécialisée dans les systèmes d'entraînement des forces armées. « Avec cette opération, le chiffre d'affaires de Rafaut, un peu au-dessus de 90 millions d'euros, va s'approcher des 100 millions d'euros », précise Nicolas Orance, directeur général du groupe, qui souligne que Rafaut entre, avec cette opération, dans « une phase plus active d'acquisitions, pour répondre aux enjeux de taille critique, en ayant toujours à l'esprit de maintenir la complémentarité entre le civil et la défense ». Le modèle dual du groupe, civil et militaire, est en effet gage de résilience. Le rachat de Secapem permet à Rafaut d'acquérir des activités liées aux systèmes d'entraînement au tir réel et des solutions de scoring hautes technologies pour les forces armées, précise L'Usine Nouvelle. L'opération concerne aussi Lun'tech, filiale de Secapem depuis 2013, qui propose des solutions complémentaires pour l'entraînement aux tirs guidés par radar. L'Usine Nouvelle du 13 janvier

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  9 septembre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  Who should manage the Pentagon’s AI data? DARPA’s director has a suggestion.

  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. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/09/06/who-should-control-the-pentagons-ai-data-darpas-director-has-a-suggestion/

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  7 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  The Army Wants Autonomous Aviation Tech. But Do Pilots Trust It?

  By Matthew Cox U.S. Army leaders are looking to autonomous technology to be the game-changer on the future battlefield, but experts are wrestling with how the service will convince aviators and leaders to trust machines to help them make life-or-death decisions in a split second. Part of the Army's new modernization effort involves manned-unmanned teaming, a concept that will rely on unmanned, autonomous aircraft and ground vehicles working, in some cases, as forward scouts to identify and select targets much quicker than humans can. Army leaders have stressed that there will always be a "human in the loop" to prevent misjudgements that could result in unintended casualties. But aviators and leaders are still reluctant to trust machines to think for themselves. "Trust in autonomy is going to be a challenge as we move forward; there is a huge psychological component to it," Patrick Mason, deputy for the Army's Program Executive Office Aviation, told an audience Wednesday at the Association of the United States Army's Aviation Hot Topic event. Col. Thomas von Eschenbach, director of the Capability Development and Integration Directorate at the Army's Aviation Center of Excellence, has been running simulations to experiment on how autonomy and artificial intelligence can make aviators more effective. "When you add autonomy and you add AI ... you quicken the pace of decisions," von Eschenbach said. "We don't want to take things away from a human; we want to want to enable humans to be faster [and] more agile, and make the decisions inside somebody else's decision cycle. Full article: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/06/army-wants-autonomous-aviation-tech-do-pilots-trust-it.html