Two Air Force installations recently inked deals to use facial recognition technology to verify the identities of those coming on base — a move that can increase the physical distance during security checks as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
The Air Force awarded TrueFace phase two Small Business Innovation Research contracts to install its technology at Eglin Air Force Base and Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. The company calls its system “frictionless access control,” where security personnel do not need to be present for a check, adding that it can verify a face in one to two seconds. Read More
Tag Archives: DoD
Fighter aircraft will soon get AI pilots
But they will be wingmen, not squadron leaders
CLASSIC DOGFIGHTS, in which two pilots match wits and machines to shoot down their opponent with well-aimed gunfire, are a thing of the past. Guided missiles have seen to that, and the last recorded instance of such combat was 32 years ago, near the end of the Iran-Iraq war, when an Iranian F-4 Phantom took out an Iraqi Su-22 with its 20mm cannon.
But memory lingers, and dogfighting, even of the simulated sort in which the laws of physics are substituted by equations running inside a computer, is reckoned a good test of the aptitude of a pilot in training. And that is also true when the pilot in question is, itself, a computer program. So, when America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an adventurous arm of the Pentagon, considered the future of air-to-air combat and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) within that future, it began with basics that Manfred von Richthofen himself might have approved of. Read More
The AI Company Helping the Pentagon Assess Disinfo Campaigns
In September, Azerbaijan and Armenia renewed fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory in the Caucasus mountains. By then, an information warfare campaign over the region had been underway for several months.
The campaign was identified using artificial intelligence technology being developed for US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), which oversees US special forces operations.
The AI system, from Primer, a company focused on the intelligence industry, identified key themes in the information campaign by analyzing thousands of public news sources. In practice, Primer’s system can analyze classified information too. Read More
Ex-Google chief: U.S. must do ‘whatever it takes’ to beat China on AI
“We want America to be inventing this stuff,” Eric Schmidt said during POLITICO’s summit on artificial intelligence. “Or at least the West.”
The U.S. needs an urgent national strategy on developing artificial intelligence technology to counter the rising competition from China, said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, chair of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Read More
NSCAI Interim Report and Third Quarter Recommendations (October 2020)
Research remains the foundation of America’s technological leadership, and the government must make the investments to solidify this foundation for artificial intelligence (AI). In the First Quarter (Q1), the Commission recommended doubling non-defense AI R&D funding, focusing investments on six priority research areas, and launching a pilot of a National AI Research Resource. In the Second Quarter (Q2), the Commission examined the Department of Defense (DoD) research enterprise and recommended ways to overcome bureaucratic and resource constraints to accelerate national security-focused AI R&D. Read More
#dod, #icTechie Software Soldier Spy
Palantir, Big Data’s scariest, most secretive unicorn, is going public. But is its crystal ball just smoke and mirrors?
… Palantir is seeking to cash in on its ability to “do it all.” Over the years, the company has worked with some of the government’s most secretive agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command.
… Palantir’s public offering is founded on the company’s sales pitch that its software represents the ultimate tool of surveillance. Named after the “Seeing Stones” in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir is designed to ingest the mountains of data collected by soldiers and spies and police — fingerprints, signals intelligence, bank records, tips from confidential informants — and enable users to spot hidden relationships, uncover criminal and terrorist networks, and even anticipate future attacks. Read More
Why Adversarial Machine Learning Is the Next Big Threat to National Security
The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), a division of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) tasked with accelerating the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across the branches of the military, has stated that AI will eventually impact every mission carried out by the DoD.
… In particular, adversarial machine learning (AML), an emerging AI practice that involves independent and state-sponsored actors manipulating machine learning algorithms to cause model malfunctions, could have catastrophic consequences. Read More
Secretive Pentagon research program looks to replace human hackers with AI
The Joint Operations Center inside Fort Meade in Maryland is a cathedral to cyber warfare. Part of a 380,000-square-foot, $520 million complex opened in 2018, the office is the nerve center for both the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency as they do cyber battle. Clusters of civilians and military troops work behind dozens of computer monitors beneath a bank of small chiclet windows dousing the room in light.
Three 20-foot-tall screens are mounted on a wall below the windows. On most days, two of them are spitting out a constant feed from a secretive program known as “Project IKE.” Read More
‘We May Be Losing The Race’ For AI With China: Bob Work
Robert Work, who pushed hard for AI under Obama, calls for major reforms to catch up with China and Russia. His model? Adm. Rickover’s creation of the nuclear Navy in the 1950s.
The former deputy secretary of defense who launched Project Maven and jumpstarted the Pentagon’s push for artificial intelligence says the Defense Department is not doing enough. Bob Work made the case that the Pentagon needs to adopt AI with the same bureaucracy-busting urgency the Navy seized on nuclear power in the 1950s, with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center acting as “the whip” the way Adm. Hyman Rickover did during the Cold War. Read More
An AI Just Beat a Human F-16 Pilot In a Dogfight — Again
In five rounds, an artificially-intelligent agent showed that it could outshoot other AI’s, and a human. So what happens next with AI in air combat?
The never-ending saga of machines outperforming humans has a new chapter. An AI algorithm has again beaten a human fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight. The contest was the finale of the U.S. military’s AlphaDogfight challenge, an effort to “demonstrate the feasibility of developing effective, intelligent autonomous agents capable of defeating adversary aircraft in a dogfight. “ Read More
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