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  2 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Pentagon’s CIO shop teams with armed services to prep for move to JEDI cloud

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's top IT official said Wednesday that his office has spent the last few months preparing the armed services to migrate to the department's long-delayed enterprise cloud as soon as it becomes available. “We're doing a lot of work with the services on getting them prepared to move their [software] development processes and cycles to DevOps so when the [Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure] cloud finally does get awarded, we're not starting at Day One,” Dana Deasy, Pentagon chief information officer, said during a Defense Writers Group roundtable. The JEDI cloud contract was originally awarded to Microsoft over Amazon Web Services 11 months ago, and then was halted by a federal judge in February. Though the court case remains unresolved, Deasy said the services must now identify tools, integration environments and directories that need set up to connect users into the cloud when it's available. Despite the judge's decision, “that's all work that we can do because it sits inside our ownership all ready,” Deasy said. While the Department of Defense has faced criticism for its single-award structure, particularly as cloud technologies have advanced during the yearslong delay, Deasy insisted the JEDI cloud still fills a critical capability gap the department needs to deliver to the war fighter: data at the tactical edge and DevOps. The JEDI cloud is the platform the department still envisions for those needs and is an important piece of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, an initiative through which the services want to connect sensors and shooters. Deasy said the DoD has solutions in place to form that connection, but still needs “that tactical cloud out at the tactical edge.” “JADC2 is going to point out, time and time again, about the need of being able to swiftly bring data together. And guess what? That data is going to be of different classifications, and bringing that together in a cross-domain way in a very quick-to-need [way] is something that is still a need we have across the Department of Defense that JEDI was specifically designed to solve for,” Deasy said. Cloud, data and artificial intelligence are core elements to enabling JADC2. Using data for joint war fighting is the top priority of the department's forthcoming data strategy, which Deasy said he expects will be released in the next 30 days. The department has a lot of data, but it is not necessarily prepared or stored in a way that is ready to be used for any sort of operations. The data strategy is expected to outline how to approach those challenges. The DoD's new chief data officer, Dave Spirk, will finalize the data strategy. After he started in June, Spirk went on a “listening tour” across the department to inform the strategy. Deasy said Spirk was told by many components that the department needs to set goals to ensure data is visible, understandable and trustworthy, while also easily within classification levels. They also said the data needs to be interoperable and secure, while also linked and integrated between sensors and shooters. The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the department's AI hub that's situated under Deasy's office, is tackling joint war fighting this year under a new project that uses AI to link intelligence gathering systems to operations and effects systems for commanders. The JAIC recently awarded its Joint Common Foundation contract to Deloitte. The company is to provide an environment for an enterprisewide AI development platform. That platform, which uses the Air Force's Cloud One enterprise cloud, was originally supposed to operate inside the JEDI cloud. Therein lies the challenge for the DoD: Components that have been waiting for the JEDI cloud have had to look elsewhere — a problem Deasy recognizes he'll have to grapple with. Right now, Deasy is encouraging components that are waiting for JEDI but have an “urgent war-fighting need” to look elsewhere for platforms. “That is obviously OK in the short term, but over time that starts to become problematic because now you're starting to set up a lot of different solutions in different environments where you're going to have to go back and sort out in an enterprise way,” Deasy said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/09/30/pentagons-cio-shop-teams-with-armed-services-to-prep-for-move-to-jedi-cloud/

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  20 août 2019 | International, Autre défense

  A robot as slow as a snail ... on purpose

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton Snails and slugs are so commonplace that we overlook the weirdness of how they move, gliding on a thin film across all sorts of terrain and obstacles. Popular imagination focuses on how slow this movement is, the snail defined by its pace, but it is at least as remarkable that the same mechanism lets a snail climb walls and move along ceilings. The movement is novel enough that there is now a snail-inspired robot, sliding across surfaces on an adhesive membrane, powered by a laser. The snail robot, produced by a joint research team at the University of Warsaw Poland, together with colleagues from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, created a centimeter-long robot powered by light. The research, published July in Macromolecular Rapid Communications, sheds new insight on how animals move in the wild, and on how small machines could be built to take advantage of that same motion. Why might military planners or designers be interested in snail-like movement? The ability to scale surfaces and cling to them alone is worth study and possibly future adaptation. There's also the simple efficiency of a creature that maneuvers on a single, durable foot. “Gastropods' adhesive locomotion has some unique properties: Using a thin layer of mucus, snails and slugs can navigate challenging environments, including glass, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE, Teflon), metal surfaces, sand, and (famously) razor blades, with only few super-hydrophobic coatings able to prevent them from crawling up a vertical surface,” write the authors. “The low complexity of a single continuous foot promises advantages in design and fabrication as well as resistance to adverse external conditions and wear, while constant contact with the surface provides a high margin of failure resistance (e.g., slip or detachment).” Snails can literally move along the edge of the spear unscathed. Surely, there's something in a robot that can do the same. The small snail robot looks like nothing so much as a discarded stick of gum, and is much smaller. At just a centimeter in length, this is not a platform capable of demonstrating much more than movement. The machine is made of Liquid Crystalline Elastomers, which can change shape when scanned by light. Combined with an artificial mucus later formed of glycerin, the robot is able to move, climb over surfaces, and even up a vertical wall, on a glass ceiling, and over obstacles, while it is powered by a laser. It does all of this at 1/50th the speed a snail would. This leaves the implications of such technology in a more distant future. Imagine a sensor that could crawl into position on the side of a building, and then stay there as combat roars around it. Or perhaps the application is as a robot adhesive, crawling charges into place at the remote direction of imperceptible light. Directing a robot into an unexpected position, and having it stay there with adhesive, could be a useful tool for future operations, and one that would be built upon research like this. The robot may be comically slow now. The pace of the technologies around it is not. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/robotics/2019/08/19/do-snail-robots-foreshadow-the-sticky-grenades-of-the-future/

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  21 avril 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

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