Military Archives - Artificial Intelligence

Raytheon to develop smart sensors, machine learning, and digital signal processing for military targeting

aiuniverse — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 05:34:20 +0000

Source – https://www.militaryaerospace.com/

ARLINGTON, Va. – Sensors experts at Raytheon Technologies Corp. will develop a new kind of camera and digital signal processing to enable electro-optical smart sensors for tactical military applications.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., announced an $8.8 million contract Wednesday to the Raytheon Intelligence & Space segment in El Segundo, Calif., for the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics (FENCE) project.

FENCE seeks to develop and demonstrate a low-latency, low-power, event-based camera and a new class of digital signal processing and machine learning algorithms that use combined spatial and temporal information to enable intelligent sensors for tactical military applications.

Neuromorphic describes silicon circuits that mimic brain operation; it exhibits low latency, sparse output, and extreme energy efficiency. Neuromorphic cameras offer sparse output, and respond only to changes in the scene, with accompanying low latency and low power for small-format cameras in sparse scenes.

Event-based imaging sensors operate asynchronously, and only transmit data from pixels that have changed, so they produce 100 times less data in sparse scenes than traditional focal plane arrays (FPAs). This leads to 100x lower latency at 100x lower power.

Despite their inherent advantages, existing event-based cameras are not compatible with military applications because military images are cluttered and dynamic. The FENCE program seeks to develop an integrated event-based infrared focal plan array with embedded digital signal processing to overcome these challenges.

The FENCE program’s primary focus is on developing an asynchronous read-out integrated circuit (ROIC) capable of very low latency and power operation, and a new, low-latency event-based infrared sensor with in-pixel processing.

The project also will develop a low-power processing layer that integrates with the ROIC to identify relevant spatial and temporal signals. The ROIC and the processing layer together will enable an integrated FENCE sensor that can operate on less power than 1.5 Watts.

The FENCE program will last for four years, and DARPA researchers issued their broad agency announcement for the project last October. Raytheon may not be the only FENCE contractor, as DARPA officials say they plan to award contracts to several companies.

On this contract Raytheon will do the work in Goleta and El Segundo, Calif.; Cambridge and Tewksbury, Mass.; McKinney, Texas; Tempe, Ariz.; and New York City, and should be finished by May 2025.

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10-Gigabit Ethernet switch for military and intelligence tactical networking introduced by Curtiss-Wright

aiuniverse — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 06:49:01 +0000

Source – https://www.intelligent-aerospace.com/

Network interconnect supports command and control, Internet of Things, cloud, storage replication, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

ASHBURN, Va. – Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions division in Ashburn, Va., is introducing the PacStar 448 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch module for military, intelligence, and commercial applications.

The Ethernet switch delivers a 10x increase in networking speed to its PacStar Modular Data Center (MDC) 2.0. The PacStar 448 module, based on Cisco ESS 9300 technology, supports high-speed switching for the MDC’s servers and storage devices.

It enables PacStar MDC to perform compute and network tasks in tactical and expeditionary settings. The module features ten 10 Gigabit Ethernet SFP+ enhanced small form-factor pluggable transceiver ports that deliver speed and density.

The enhanced network interconnect performance provided by PacStar 448 supports command and control, Internet of Things, cloud, storage replication, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The module also is a drop-in replacement for previous Ethernet switch modules. Curtiss-Wright acquired PacStar last fall.

PacStar MDC is based on the PacStar 400-series commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) small-form-factor modules. It is a tactical and expeditionary rugged data center capable of hosting mission command, cloud storage, sensor fusion, AI, and analytics applications.

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Military seeks to train and aid medics and mechanics using artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality

aiuniverse — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 06:45:20 +0000

Source – https://www.militaryaerospace.com/

Goal is for military mechanics and medics to perform tasks within and beyond their skills with help from real-time AI and augmented reality assistants.

ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are asking industry to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology that perceives the environment, reasons about physical tasks, and models the user — all in real-time.

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a broad agency announcement (HR001121S0015) last Friday for the Perceptually Enabled Task Guidance (PTG) project.

The goal is to enable military mechanics, medics, and other specialists to perform tasks within and beyond their skills by providing just-in-time feedback and instructions for physical tasks.

The AI will capitalize on commercially available sensor technologies to see what the user sees and hear what the user hears, and will provide information and instruction to the user using augmented reality.

Military personnel must perform an increasing number of tasks and more complex tasks than ever before, DARPA researchers explain. Mechanics, for example, must repair more types of sophisticated machines and platforms, and Medics must perform more procedures over extended periods of time.

The goal of the PTG program is to make users more versatile by expanding their skills and more proficient by reducing their errors by using AI assistants that provide just-in-time visual and audio feedback.

Users of PTG assistants will wear head-mounted cameras and microphones so that the assistant can see and hear what the user does. Users also will wear augmented reality headsets that enable assistants to provide auditory and graphics feedback.

The assistant will learn about the user’s tasks by ingesting knowledge from checklists, illustrated manuals, training videos, and related information.

Users may ask the assistant questions like “what do I do next?” When a user makes a critical mistake, the system should warn the user and suggest remedial action. When a task is new to a user, the assistant should walk the user through the necessary steps.

PTG technology will take advantage of recent advances in deep learning for video and speech analysis, automated reasoning for task and plan monitoring, and augmented reality for human-computer interfaces.

The program, moreover, is looking for ways to address four key problems: knowledge transfer, perceptual ground, perceptual attention, and user modeling.

Knowledge transfer will enable AI assistants to learn from instructions intended for humans, with an emphasis on checklists, illustrated manuals, and training videos.

Perceptual grounding will align the objects, settings, actions, sounds, and words recognized by an assistant with the terms it uses to describe and model tasks, so as to map observations to its task knowledge.

Perceptual attention will enable assistants to pay attention to what’s relevant to tasks, while ignoring extraneous stimuli, and respond to unexpected events that may alter a user’s goals or suggest a new task.

User modeling, meanwhile, will help the AI assistant determine how much information to present to users and when to do so, taking into account what the users, a physical model of what the users are doing, and a model of how well the user can pay attention based on his emotional state.

The PTG program is seeking proposals in two technical areas — the first for fundamental research into knowledge transfer, perceptual grounding, perceptual attention, and user modeling; and the second for integrated demonstrations of assistants for mechanics, medics, or aircraft pilots.

DARPA experts will brief industry virtually from 1 to 4:45 p.m. on 18 March 2021 via Zoom Webinar. Register for the briefings online at https://www.schafertmd.com/DARPA/I2O/PTG/PD/?p=registration. More information about the PTG proposers day briefings is online at https://www.schafertmd.com/DARPA/I2O/PTG/PD/.

Companies interested should submit abstracts no later than 31 March 2021, and full proposals no later than 14 May 2021, to the DARPA BAA Website at https://baa.darpa.mil. More information is online at https://beta.sam.gov/opp/39d76d1a5c684eb0a6c834f17aaa678d/view.

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Human Intelligence: Military Aircraft Strike Terrorists in Maima Tusuye

aiuniverse — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 10:14:46 +0000

Source: prnigeria.com

The subsidiary Operation HAIL STORM 2, currently being executed by the Air Task Force (ATF) of Operation LAFIYA DOLE has again recorded appreciable success in their resolve to forestall terrorists’ activities in the North East Zone.

Crews of Operation HAIL STORM 2 neutralized several Boko Haram Terrorists’ (BHTs’) and destroyed their hideouts at Maima and Tusuye, settlements near Warshale and Tongule along the Dikwa-Rann axis of Borno State during air strikes executed on 1 October 2020.

This feat was achieved sequel to credible Human Intelligence reports as well as series of aerial surveillance missions, which indicated that the locations were being used as rendezvous points by the BHTs.

Accordingly, the ATF dispatched an appropriate force package of Nigerian Air Force (NAF) fighter jets and helicopter gunships to engage the 2 locations.

The attack aircraft scored devastating hits in the target areas, destroying some structures and neutralizing several of the terrorists.

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Google still ‘covertly’ invests in military AI projects

aiuniverse — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 16:44:31 +0000

Source: itpro.co.uk

Despite pledging to cut ties with weapons-based artificial intelligence (AI)projects, Google is using its investment arm to cultivate startup firms that actively engage in military and law enforcement contracts.

The industry giant’s involvement in a highly contentious AI-powered Pentagon drones project last year, dubbed Project Maven, garnered anger and protestations from its own employees.

Following a messy public dispute, Google published an ethical code of conduct and declared it would pull out Project Maven, as well as work on any direct AI military applications. The firm even withdrew from a $10 billion Pentagon cloud project in October because it may conflict with its “corporate values”.

Whistleblowers, however, have claimed Google is circumventing its own guidelines by providing funds and guidance to AI startups via its investment arm Gradient Ventures, according to The Intercept. This is a financial fund created by Google specifically to invest in AI startups.

Not only do these companies receive financial support, Google employees said, but they are also granted access to Google’s vast repository of training data accumulated through work with its own AI systems.

Moreover, these startups will receive advanced AI training on behalf of Google. Emails also suggest senior Google engineers will take up roles in these startups in order to offer “the kind of hand-holding support that we think is helpful in growing an AI ecosystem”.

When the company published its code of ethics, critics suggested the exact terms left the door open to continued involvement with the military and law enforcement in other areas such as recruitment and training.

Companies supported by Gradient Ventures, however, are directly involved in supplementing weapons systems with AI technology. Cogniac, for example, provides image-processing software to the US army in order to assess battlefield drone data.

CAPE productions, meanwhile, provides law enforcement with AI-powered software to guide fleets of drones to conduct aerial surveillance.

Google isn’t the only major tech company to sustain heavy criticism for its involvement with law enforcement. Amazon, for instance, has been savaged by immigration rights groups for its work on behalf of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

IT Pro asked a Google spokesperson to explain how its investment activities were consistent with its own ethical guidelines.

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How industry can build better AI for the military

aiuniverse — Mon, 10 Jun 2019 10:49:21 +0000

Source:- c4isrnet.com

As AI becomes more prominent in the national security community, officials are grappling with where to use it most effectively.

During a panel discussion at the C4ISRNET conference June 6, leaders discussed the role of industry building AI that will be used by the military.

After studying small and big companies creating AI technology, Col. Stoney Trent, the chief of operations at the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said he found commercial groups do not have the same motivations that exist in the government.

“Commercial groups are poorly incentivized for rigorous testing. For them that represents a business risk,” Trent said. Because of this, he the government needs to work with the commercial sector to create these technologies.

“What the Defense Department has to offer in this space is encouragement, an incentive structure for better testing tools and methods that allows us to understand how a product is going to perform when we are under conditions of national consequence because I can’t wait,” Trent said. “Hopefully, the nation will be at peace long enough to not have a high bandwidth of experiences with weapons implementations, but when that happens, we need them to absolutely work. That’s a quality of commercial technology development.”

For this to take place, the Department of Defense needs to help create the right environment.

“All of this is predicated on the Pentagon doing things as well,” said Kara Frederick, associate fellow for the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. “Making an environment conducive to the behaviors that you are seeking to encourage. That environment can be the IT environment, common standards for data processing, common standards for interactions with industry, I think would help.”

Panelists said national security leaders also need to weigh the risks of relying more on AI technology, one of which is non-state actors using AI for nefarious purposes.

Trent said he sees AI as the new arms race but noted that in this arena, destruction may be easier than creation.

“AI is the modern-day armor anti-armor arms race,” Trent said. “The Joint AI Center, one of the important features of it is that it does offer convergence for best practices, data sources, data standards, etc. The flip side is we fully understand there are a variety of ways you can undermine artificial intelligence and most of those are actually easier than developing good resilient AI.”

Frederick said part of this problem stems from the structure of the AI community.

“I think what’s so singular about the AI community, especially the AI research community, is that its so open,” Frederick said. “Even at Facebook, we open source some of these algorithms and we put it our there for people to manipulate. [There is this] idea that non-state actors, especially those without strategic intent or ones that we can’t pin strategic intent to, could get a hold of some of these ways to code in certain malicious inputs [and] we need to start being serious about it.”

However, before tackling any of these problems, leaders need to first decide when it is appropriate to use AI

Rob Monto, lead of the Army’s Advanced Concepts and Experimentation office, described this process as an evolution that takes place between AI and its users.

“AI is like electricity,” he said. “It can be anywhere and everywhere. You can either get electrocuted by it or you target specific applications for it. You need to know what you want the AI to do, and then you spend months and years building out. If you don’t have your data set available, you do that upfront architecture and collection of information. Then you train your algorithms and build that specifically to support that specific use case…AI is for targeted applications to aid decisions, at least in the military space, to aid the user.”

Once the decision is made how and where to use AI, there are other technologies that must make advances to meet AI. One the biggest challenges, said Chad Hutchinson, director of engineering at the Crystal Group., is the question of hardware and characteristics such as thermal performance.

“AI itself is pushing the boundaries of what the hardware can do,” Hutchinson said.

Hardware technology is not the only obstacle in AI’s path. These issues could stem from policy or human resource shortfalls.

“What we find is the non-technology barriers are far more significant than the technology barriers,” Trent said.

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Government Considering Use Of Artificial Intelligence For Military

aiuniverse — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 05:00:02 +0000

Source – ndtv.com

India is considering the use of Artificial Intelligence for national security and military strategic purposes and the government is studying a report recommending the use of technology in aviation, naval, land systems, cyber, nuclear and biological warfare.

Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre told the Lok Sabha that the ministry has initiated the process of preparing Indian defence forces in their use of Artificial Intelligence and leveraging India” capabilities in machine learning sectors.

This, he said, has a potential to fuel technology-driven economic growth and provide military superiority.

To study strategic implications of Artificial Intelligence for national security, a task force comprising the government, services, academia, industry, professionals and start-ups was constituted in February this year.

The group led by Natarajan Chandrasekharan, Chairman Tata Sons, was tasked to prepare a road map for Artificial Intelligence for national security purposes.

The Task Force submitted its report on June 30 after studying the level of Artificial Intelligence development in India in general and specifically in the context of defence needs.

The group has made recommendations relating to making India a significant power of Artificial Intelligence for both defensive and offensive needs, Mr Bhamre said.

The group has also made recommendations for policy and institutional interventions required to regulate and encourage robust Artificial Intelligence-based technologies for the defence sector in the country.

Considering that most Artificial Intelligence work is happening in the private sector, it has also made recommendations to work with start-ups and commercial industry in the field of use of Artificial Intelligence for defence purposes.

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