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AI enabling technologies: a survey

Summary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the opportunity to revolutionize the way the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) address the challenges of evolving threats, data deluge, and rapid courses of action. Developing an end-to-end artificial intelligence system involves parallel development of different pieces that must work together in order to provide capabilities that can be used by decision makers, warfighters and analysts. These pieces include data collection, data conditioning, algorithms, computing, robust artificial intelligence, and human-machine teaming. While much of the popular press today surrounds advances in algorithms and computing, most modern AI systems leverage advances across numerous different fields. Further, while certain components may not be as visible to end-users as others, our experience has shown that each of these interrelated components play a major role in the success or failure of an AI system. This article is meant to highlight many of these technologies that are involved in an end-to-end AI system. The goal of this article is to provide readers with an overview of terminology, technical details and recent highlights from academia, industry and government. Where possible, we indicate relevant resources that can be used for further reading and understanding.
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Summary

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the opportunity to revolutionize the way the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) address the challenges of evolving threats, data deluge, and rapid courses of action. Developing an end-to-end artificial intelligence system involves parallel development of different pieces that must work together...

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Artificial intelligence: short history, present developments, and future outlook, final report

Summary

The Director's Office at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) requested a comprehensive study on artificial intelligence (AI) focusing on present applications and future science and technology (S&T) opportunities in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division (Division 5). This report elaborates on the main results from the study. Since the AI field is evolving so rapidly, the study scope was to look at the recent past and ongoing developments to lead to a set of findings and recommendations. It was important to begin with a short AI history and a lay-of-the-land on representative developments across the Department of Defense (DoD), intelligence communities (IC), and Homeland Security. These areas are addressed in more detail within the report. A main deliverable from the study was to formulate an end-to-end AI canonical architecture that was suitable for a range of applications. The AI canonical architecture, formulated in the study, serves as the guiding framework for all the sections in this report. Even though the study primarily focused on cyber security and information sciences, the enabling technologies are broadly applicable to many other areas. Therefore, we dedicate a full section on enabling technologies in Section 3. The discussion on enabling technologies helps the reader clarify the distinction among AI, machine learning algorithms, and specific techniques to make an end-to-end AI system viable. In order to understand what is the lay-of-the-land in AI, study participants performed a fairly wide reach within MIT LL and external to the Laboratory (government, commercial companies, defense industrial base, peers, academia, and AI centers). In addition to the study participants (shown in the next section under acknowledgements), we also assembled an internal review team (IRT). The IRT was extremely helpful in providing feedback and in helping with the formulation of the study briefings, as we transitioned from datagathering mode to the study synthesis. The format followed throughout the study was to highlight relevant content that substantiates the study findings, and identify a set of recommendations. An important finding is the significant AI investment by the so-called "big 6" commercial companies. These major commercial companies are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM. They dominate in the AI ecosystem research and development (R&D) investments within the U.S. According to a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, cumulative R&D investment in AI amounts to about $30 billion per year. This amount is substantially higher than the R&D investment within the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security. Therefore, the DoD will need to be very strategic about investing where needed, while at the same time leveraging the technologies already developed and available from a wide range of commercial applications. As we will discuss in Section 1 as part of the AI history, MIT LL has been instrumental in developing advanced AI capabilities. For example, MIT LL has a long history in the development of human language technologies (HLT) by successfully applying machine learning algorithms to difficult problems in speech recognition, machine translation, and speech understanding. Section 4 elaborates on prior applications of these technologies, as well as newer applications in the context of multi-modalities (e.g., speech, text, images, and video). An end-to-end AI system is very well suited to enhancing the capabilities of human language analysis. Section 5 discusses AI's nascent role in cyber security. There have been cases where AI has already provided important benefits. However, much more research is needed in both the application of AI to cyber security and the associated vulnerability to the so-called adversarial AI. Adversarial AI is an area very critical to the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security, where malicious adversaries can disrupt AI systems and make them untrusted in operational environments. This report concludes with specific recommendations by formulating the way forward for Division 5 and a discussion of S&T challenges and opportunities. The S&T challenges and opportunities are centered on the key elements of the AI canonical architecture to strengthen the AI capabilities across the DoD, IC, and Homeland Security in support of national security.
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Summary

The Director's Office at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT LL) requested a comprehensive study on artificial intelligence (AI) focusing on present applications and future science and technology (S&T) opportunities in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division (Division 5). This report elaborates on the main results from the study. Since the...

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Next-generation technologies to enable sensor networks

Published in:
Handbook of Sensor Networks, Chapter 2

Summary

Examples are advances in ground moving target indicator (GMTI) processing, space-time adaptive processing (STAP), target discrimination, and electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM). All these advances have improved the capabilities of radar sensors. Major improvements expected in the next several years will come from exploiting collaborative network-centric architectures to leverage synergies among individual sensors. Such an approach has become feasible as a result of major advances in network computing, as well as communication technologies in both wireless and fiber networks. The exponential growth of digital technology, together with highly capable networks, enable in-depth exploitation of sensor synergy, including multi-aspect sensing. New signal processing algorithms exploiting multi-sensor data have been demonstrated in non-real-time, achieving improved performance against surface mobile targets by leveraging high-speed sensor networks. The paper demonstrates a significant advancement in exploiting complex ground moving target indicator (GMTI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data to accurately geo-locate and identify mobile targets.
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Summary

Examples are advances in ground moving target indicator (GMTI) processing, space-time adaptive processing (STAP), target discrimination, and electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM). All these advances have improved the capabilities of radar sensors. Major improvements expected in the next several years will come from exploiting collaborative network-centric architectures to leverage synergies among individual...

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