Pentagon Eyeing AI Center for Tech Development.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin
• Position: Algorithmic Warfare

* A new center to further develop artificial intelligence for military applications is in the works at the Pentagon.

"AI is a long-term technology that will be useful for defensive and perhaps offensive purposes as well," said Eric Schmidt, chairman of the Defense Innovation Board. "The creation of... [a center] is under review right now and I suspect will occur."

The board is recommending that the center be created in partnership with one or more universities to ensure it is world class, he said during testimony to the House Armed Services Committee in April.

Eighteen months ago, the Defense Innovation Board proposed establishing an AI center that would centralize the coordination of the technology and provide enterprise expertise to the office of the secretary of defense, he said. It would also encourage decentralized execution of artificial intelligence projects and the insertion of such technology into existing programs of record.

This can be done without disrupting the work of the various services labs and other Pentagon research organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he added.

Already the department has established an effort known as Project Maven which is meant to assist the military with analyzing drone footage faster using machine learning.

The AI center would focus on "solving operational problems with existing commercially available technology that requires modest adaptation to military use cases," Schmidt said.

A center is needed to better develop the technology, which is expected to offer wide-ranging benefits for the military, he said.

"DoD has yet to embrace the transformational capabilities of AI," Schmidt said. "In this space, the department is neither keeping pace with private industry or academia, nor effectively incorporating or guiding breakthroughs for defense."

The Pentagon collects vast amounts of data from a variety of sources, but takes few steps to label, structure and process them, he said. "Though labeled data is the fuel for AI, DoD has yet to fully leverage the value of both unclassified and classified data sets," he added.

Deeper focus, closer collaboration and more resources devoted to AI are needed in order to solve the Pentagon's most pressing issues, he said.

Schmidt--who is the former executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet--said most of the Defense Department's work in artificial intelligence has concentrated on basic research.

That "has been foundational to...