By
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on May 07, 2021 at 1:47 PM
Key functions of the Army’s “common platform” for AI development
WASHINGTON: As the Army develops AIs for different missions, from artillery targeting to helicopter maintenance, it doesn’t want each project to reinvent the wheel. So the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force is working with Carnegie Mellon University and contractor VISIMO to create a shared toolkit of reusable algorithms, test data, and development tools. It’s meant to be a “common platform” or virtual “workbench” on which Army units can build a wide variety of AIs.
From a cold start in August, with no code on hand, the team had a functioning bare-bones version – what’s called a Minimum Viable Product – ready in five months, a pace the AITF’s chief data scientist, Lt. Col. Isaac Faber, called worthy of a Silicon Valley startup in an interview.
By
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on May 03, 2021 at 12:02 PM
An experimental Army robot, nicknamed Origin, during the Project Convergence 20 exercise at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz.
WASHINGTON: The Army’s Artificial Intelligence Task Force is teaching AIs to share data and decide which intel is good enough to show a human, AITF experts told me. The tech will be tested in the service’s annual Project Convergence wargames this fall.
Douglas Matty
The objective isn’t to usurp a human’s role in decision-making, AITF director Doug Matty emphasized in an interview. To the contrary, it’s to empower them with highlights cherry-picked by computer out of masses of data – much of which isn’t accessible to a human user in any form today – without overwhelming them with trivial or unconfirmed reports. Experiments like Project Convergence, Matty argued, show that such an empowered human isn’t significantly slower than a purely computer-controlled approach.