Two Defense Department artificial-intelligence experts testified on Capitol Hill yesterday on DOD's efforts to transform delivery of capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence to the nation's warfighters.
Lisa Porter, deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, and Dana Deasy, DOD's chief information officer, testified at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities.
The John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019 directed the defense secretary to conduct a comprehensive national review of advances in AI relevant to the needs of the military services. Section 238 directed the secretary to craft a strategic plan to develop, mature, adopt and transition AI technologies into operational use.
“Today we are experiencing an explosion of interest in a subfield of AI called machine learning, where algorithms have become remarkably good at classification and prediction tasks when they can be trained on very large amounts of data,” Porter told the House panel. Today's AI capabilities offer potential solutions to many defense-specific problems, such as object identification in drone video or satellite imagery and detection of cyber threats on networks, she said.
However, she added, several issues must…
