artificial intelligence

Superman might have beaten bullets with his speed, but the U.S. Defense Department intends to do better. It has its sights set on developing cognitive technologies—computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, for example—that are faster than the speed of human thought.

The military plans to tap machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, to enhance decision making.

The U.S. Defense Department’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO) will conduct a solutions meeting in late October in McLean, Virginia, according to a recent announcement posted on the FedBizOpps website. Companies will provide short technical presentations to government representatives about their technologies and products with the potential to be selected for pilot projects or experimentation if the technology appears to match the department's cyber needs.

The RRTO is interested in:

U.S. Army officials expect that by this fall, they will have formal approval of a rapid prototyping process for acquiring cyber and electronic warfare prototypes assessed during the just-completed Cyber Quest 2017 exercise at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

Army officials describe Cyber Quest as an annual cyber and electronic warfare exploration and collaboration event hosted by the Cyber Center of Excellence. This is the second year for the event.

Charles River Analytics Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been awarded an $8,005,056 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for software. Contractor will provide artificial intelligence systems that can explain why a decision was made with supporting details that a domain expert can understand. Work will be performed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is expected to be complete by May 3, 2021. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition with 62 offers received. Fiscal 2016 research, development, test, and evaluation funds in the amount of $1,305,372 are being obligated at the time of award. Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, New York, is the contracting activity (FA8750-17-C-0118).

Society’s insatiable appetite for connecting objects in the physical world to the Internet has industry’s wheels turning to fuel the materializing disruptive ecosystem called the Internet of Things, or IoT. But the good of convenience goes hand in hand with the bad of cyber risks, experts warn, spurring the U.S. government’s search for the self-healing networks of the future based on the automation tools of today.

Ask Siri to tell you a joke and Apple’s virtual assistant usually bombs. The voice-controlled system’s material is limited and profoundly mediocre. It’s not Siri’s fault. That is what the technology knows. 

According to a knowledgeable friend, machines operate in specific ways. They receive inputs. They process those inputs. They deliver outputs. Of course, I argued. Not because I believed he was wrong, but because I had a lofty notion of the limitations of machines and what artificial intelligence (AI) could become.  

The U.S. government wants to buck the trend of years of steady but slow progress to make computers much smarter at everyday mundane tasks. The Defense Department and other agencies want to pick up the pace to mirror the disruptive advances of years past that led to the Internet, Global Positioning System and Siri.

Private companies already might be beating the government to the finish line, producing advances some say are equal parts inspiring and troubling. The technology blitz has prompted government and industry officials alike to sound cautionary alarms about advanced artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already all around us: It’s the mobile personal virtual assistant, and the Google-created computer program that defeated the world’s champion of the ancient Chinese board game, Go. It’s the self-driving car that soon will be taking you to the office. There’s no doubt machines are smarter than ever, and getting smarter all the time.

BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration, Technology Solutions-Advanced Information Technologies, Burlington, Massachusetts, has been awarded a $9,402,650 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for software and reports. The contractor will provide development and integration of the latest advancements in machine learning that benefit this effort as well as architectural enhancements that increase the flexibility and agility of applying analytics to solve space situational awareness problems and take full advantage of high-performance computing capabilities and multiple forms of visualization of the reasoning performed by the analytics involved in this effort.