DARPA Official Explains the Many Parts of Military AI

Artificial intelligence has many moving parts that need to work together for the technology to benefit warfighters, according to a top research official from the Department of Defense. 

William Scherlis, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Innovation Office, said conversations about AI are often solely focused on machine learning, Defense .gov reported. 

He said the field also involves symbolic reasoning, statistical learning, knowledge representation, search and planning, data, cloud infrastructure, algorithms and computing, among others. 

“If you want to do strategy planning, then you're gonna have a mashup of machine learning with, maybe, game theory and a few other elements. So when we talk about AI, sometimes people are referring to just machine-learning algorithms and data and training,” Scherlis said during a virtual panel discussion at the Defense One Genius Machines 2021 summit.

He said the DOD's AI research effort is focused on integrating the technology as an augmentation for other systems. 

Scherlis said the current wave of AI development is concentrated on combining the fields of symbolic reasoning and statistical learning. 

AI technology has not matured enough to be used at its peak, he added.

“We're in the very early days of a very long history of continued very rapid development in the AI field,” Scherlis said. “At DARPA, we have another number of programs that are, that are addressing these challenges,” Scherlis said.