By Defense Systems Staff
Mar 16, 2021
As artificial intelligence advances, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is moving toward treating computers less as tools and more as partners that can help solve complex military problems, according to Matthew Turek, program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office.
Speaking at FCW’s March 10 Defense Readiness Workshop, Turek said DARPA has approximately 30 programs focused on AI and another 90 that are leveraging AI technologies -- from foundational science and hardware to algorithms, knowledge representations, machine learning and autonomy. Some of those, he added, are already in the field.
Those programs fall into three waves of AI. The first covers symbolic reasoning, in which engineers create sets of rules to represent knowledge in well-defined in domains, like optimizing the shipping of military equipment. The second wave applies statistical models that have been trained on big data for specific problem domains to deliver nuanced classification and prediction capabilities. This type of AI has been used for face detection algorithms and virtual assistants like Siri – whose foundational technology was developed at DARPA, Turek said.