Artificial intelligence, how the Pentagon’s Project Maven (formerly Google) is doing
The NGA, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, is making great strides with Project Maven, the Pentagon program that aims to build image recognition systems to improve drone attacks in war zones
Maven project remember? That is the Department of Defense's artificial intelligence tool, designed to process images and full-motion video from drones and automatically detect potential targets.
Last year, La Nga, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is one of the most important American intelligence agencies, announced that it would assume operational control of the GEOINT AI services of the Maven project from the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security under President Biden's proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year. The agency was already involved with Project Maven since its launch in 2017.
Since taking operational control of the Defense Department's most important AI tool in January, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has made "leaps and bounds" toward improving geolocation accuracy, target tracking and automation of work processes, according to its director.
"The bottom line here is that under NGA's watch, Maven has made significant technological advances and has already contributed to some of our nation's most important operations," Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, NGA director at the NGA, said on May 22. GEOINT conference in St. Louis, Defense News reports.
The Pentagon's AI initiative to decipher aerial surveillance footage made headlines in 2018 when Google employees protested the tech giant's involvement in the program forcing the company to pull out.
Meanwhile, Pentagon leaders continue to look into ways to use generative AI for intelligence gathering and future warfare even as ethical concerns about the use of artificial intelligence in the military are growing in recent times.
All the details.
WHAT IS THE MAVEN PROJECT
Since April 2017, the Pentagon has been working on the Maven, also known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT), with the mission to “accelerate the integration of big data and machine learning at the Department of Defense (DoD)”. The project uses computer vision software to automatically analyze footage collected by US military drones.
Since January, the GEOINT AI services have been overseen by the Nga, the leading American intelligence agency for processing and analyzing satellite and other aerial images, as well as for mapping the Earth. Parts of Project Maven that don't involve GEOINT have gone to the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, Defense News said.
ABANDONED BY GOOGLE IN 2018
In summer 2018, Google, an early participant in Maven, said it would stop working on the project. The Mountain View giant was forced into the decision by protests from employees who claim Big G is out of the war business.
Despite Google's withdrawal, the Pentagon continued work on the Maven project arguing that the program “improves human-machine team performance by fusing intelligence and operations through AI/ML [artificial intelligence/machine learning] and augmented reality technology. Project Maven seeks to reduce the time needed for decision making to a fraction of the time needed without AI/ML.”
TODAY'S PROGRESS
In a briefing with reporters, NGA director Whitworth declined to provide details on how the Maven project is being used due to security concerns. Still, Whitworth said military commanders are "really excited" by the growth of the tool and the agency is expanding its partnership with academia and industry as they continue to develop the system, Defense News reports.
Mark Munsell, director of data and innovation at Nga, said the agency's primary mandate within Project Maven is to increase the quality of AI and machine learning algorithms and thereby enhance their capability to detect targets within the images adding that the agency used scenarios from the ongoing war in Ukraine to improve the artificial intelligence algorithms used by Maven and other programs.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/intelligenza-artificiale-come-va-il-progetto-maven-ex-google-del-pentagono/ on Wed, 24 May 2023 05:53:39 +0000.