Envision the future and work backwards from there / by Admin

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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and AFCEA Intelligence presented the first Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) Industry Day on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 at NGA Campus East, Springfield, VA. The event was part of ODNI’s outreach in support of its recently released publication, “The AIM Initiative, A Strategy for Augmenting Intelligence Using Machines.”  

Dan Coats, Director of National Intelligence, wrote in the AIM foundational materials;

“Closing the gap between decisions and data collection is a top priority for the Intelligence Community (IC). The pace at which data are generated and collected is increasing exponentially—and the IC workforce available to analyze and interpret this all-source, cross-domain data is not.

Leveraging artificial intelligence, automation, and augmentation technologies to amplify the effectiveness of the existing IC workforce, advance mission capability, and enhance the IC’s ability to provide needed data interpretation to decision makers. The Augmenting Intelligence using Machines (AIM) Strategy provides the framework for the incorporation of AIM technologies to accelerate mission capability development across the IC.

The Vision of AIM

To secure and maintain strategic competitive information advantage for the US Intelligence Community for the next decade through focused development and rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Augmentation, and Automation technologies.

The mission of the Intelligence community is built on analyzing data and connecting disparate data sets to apply context to data and infer meaning from data. Ultimately analytic judgments based on all available data are made. The pace at which data is generated, whether by collection or publically available information (PAI), is increasing exponentially and long ago exceeded the collective ability of the IC to understand it or to find the most relevant data with which to make analytic judgments. AIM AAA technologies (Artificial intelligence, process Automation, and IC officer Augmentation) as key transformative elements are crucial for future mission success and efficiency.

AIM Challenges

The IC wide strategy in the AIM initiative address three critical challenges facing the IC. First, there is intense competition in the private sector for AI and especially ML talent. The IC seeks to establish new incentive and hiring models and stop competing internally for the same scarce resources. Second, AI and ML systems require large high-quality tagged data sets that must be shared with IC partners to the maximum extent allowable. Rule sets, algorithms, and expert knowledge bases that capture the tacit knowledge of intelligence domain experts must be available to all appropriate and relevant mission areas. Third, to rapidly accelerate AI adoption, the IC must have a solid digital foundation. This means leveraging the investments already made in the IC Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) and continuing to invest in and improve the IC ITE infrastructure.

AIM Objectives

The AIM initiative has four primary investment objectives:

Digital Foundation, Data, and Science and Technical Intelligence (S&TI): AI activities are not a substitute for an enduring, secure, standardized, and measurable IC-wide digital infrastructure and data ecosystem; they are dependent on that foundation. In addition, the IC must improve foundational understanding of many aspects of AAA, to include a deeper understanding of the commercial supply chain, identification of ongoing developmental programs within the federal government that can be leveraged for a wider audience, and identification of adversarial uses of AI.

Adopt Commercial and Open Source Narrow AI Solutions: The IC must leverage the existing private sector and government investments by rapidly transitioning the best available commercial and open source Narrow AI capabilities.

Invest in the Gaps (AI Assurance and Multimodal AI): To create and maintain strategic advantage, the IC must develop both the capability and capacity to take advantage of available data across all INTs and open source, and develop AI solutions that process and relate information from multiple modalities. To facilitate this, the IC must continue to implement policies to break down traditional INT stovepipes.

Invest in Basic Research Focused on Sense-Making: It is not enough to simply fuse information from multiple modalities together in response to a single, narrow task. The construction of shared models is needed to provide the basis for trust between human and machine teams. This level of understanding demands basic research advances in representing knowledge; goals and intent; entity extraction from incomplete, multimodal data; and discourse generation.

Finding Funding within the AIM Initiative

At the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) meeting on acquisition held April 10th, 2018, the AIM initiative held the top priority within ODNI, according to the slides presented by Kevin Meiners, assistant DNI for acquisition, technology and facilities. The philosophy the ODNI has been following is to delegate Milestone Decision Authority directly to the IC agency component, meaning that funding opportunities under this initiative are directly under the control of the individual agencies under the ODNI.

To ensure continuity across the 17 disparate agencies that make up the IC, program managers looking for AI solutions are adhering to the concept of AIM, or Augmenting Intelligence using Machine. Naturally, the procurement portals for these agencies should be the starting point for anyone looking to access funding opportunities.

ODNI Initiatives

One initiative ODNI offers is the Intelligence Science and Technology Partnership (In-STeP) initiative, through which participating businesses can present their science and technology projects to Intelligence Community (IC) stakeholders in one-on-one meetings. Connected to that initiative is the Intelligence Formulation of Risk Management (In-FoRM) program, which provides the IC and its partners with use-inspired, basic research approaches for advancing and transforming IC capabilities to resolve In-Step-identified challenges.

Honey also announced ODNI is offering approximately $1 million in prizes as part of the Xploratory Challenge Series under its Intelligence Ventures in Exploratory Science & Technology (In-VEST) program. The challenge is focused on the areas of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning. More details on the challenge are to be released soon.

Notes and Further Reading