DoD Builds New Algorithms For Video Monitoring.

• Position: NEWS BRIEFS

* The Defense Department is making strides in its effort to harness machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to assist with monitoring footage taken from unmanned aerial vehicles.

In spring 2017, the department announced the creation of the algorithmic warfare crossfunctional team, or Project Maven, which is dedicated to utilizing big data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and other advanced computer technologies to gain a competitive advantage over peer adversaries.

The team has recently seen success in developing algorithms that assist in monitoring full-motion video collected by UAVs, said Travis Axtell, informatics technical director and deputy for Project Maven under the office of the under secretary of defense for intelligence.

"The early results definitely show that we can augment [military analysts] and give them some new functionality to things that they are currently doing manually over several hours, and we can now do them in a handful of minutes," he said at a 2017 webcast conference hosted by Amazon Web Services.

The Project Maven team now wants to apply those algorithms "to a historical context," he added. Rather than simply monitoring live feeds, new techniques could help intelligence officers extract relevant information from previously recorded footage, he noted.

Advanced cloud computing technologies could assist in "pulling out detections from that footage, storing that and then...