{"id":53344,"date":"2023-06-01T21:37:25","date_gmt":"2023-06-01T13:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/despite-advances-in-ai-technology-its-still-not-good-enough-nga-official-says\/"},"modified":"2023-06-01T21:37:25","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T13:37:25","slug":"despite-advances-in-ai-technology-its-still-not-good-enough-nga-official-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/despite-advances-in-ai-technology-its-still-not-good-enough-nga-official-says\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite Advances in AI Technology, it\u2019s Still Not \u2018Good Enough,\u2019 NGA Official Says"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

ST. LOUIS <\/em>\u2014 There is no need to pause development of artificial intelligence (AI) despite recent advances that have alarmed experts and policy-makers about hidden dangers in the use of the technology because it currently is \u201cnot good enough\u201d and continued maturing of the technology will ultimately improve capabilities, an official with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency<\/strong> (NGA) said last week.<\/p>\n

NGA\u2019s primary investment focus is in \u201cmachine learning in the domain of computer vision \u2026 to be able to detect objects of interest, to be able to derive information from those objects, [and] to be able to do it with better initial accuracy,\u201d Mark Munsell, director of the Data and Digital Innovation Directorate at the agency, said at the GEOINT 2023 Symposium.<\/p>\n

NGA and the Defense Department are \u201cnot pausing\u201d the development of this technology and \u201cI say this because we\u2019re still not good enough,\u201d Munsell said. The intelligence officials that brief the combatant commanders and the president \u201care going to say we\u2019re not good enough. They\u2019re going to say that the positive identification of the objects is not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

The combatant commanders will say that the speed and accuracy of the AI technology is not where it needs need to be and that \u201cwe need better labels, we need better algorithms, [and] we need better models from those resulting in better detections, resulting in more useful information to be able to support the policy maker and our combatant commanders,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

AI technology is becoming increasingly important to NGA because the amount of data the agency is collecting from remote Earth imaging sensors such as satellites is outpacing the ability of human analysts to scour for potential targets. Earlier this year NGA took ownership of the Defense Department\u2019s Maven project, an AI and machine learning platform that the agency has integrated into its workflow to help customers such as the combatant commands automatically search and detect items of interest.<\/p>\n

Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, NGA director, told attendees here last week that the use of Maven has \u201cincreased fidelity of targets, improved geolocation accuracy, and refined our test and evaluation process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Munsell\u2019s directorate oversees the Maven effort, which is expected to become a program of record later this year. NGA used the symposium as a platform to discuss Maven and Munsell said going forward \u201cWe\u2019re going to do a lot more talking about Maven\u201d and what the agency\u2019s needs for the program are.<\/p>\n

The actual object detection performance of Maven is classified, Munsell said, but he outlined the expectations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have analysts of course that would expect things to be 100 percent accurate.\u201d he said. \u201cI have combatant commanders that will expect the object identification to be 100 percent and the geolocation accuracy to be two meters or less so they can deliver precision guided munitions. Those are the expectations. Are we there? We\u2019re not there. Will we get there? Absolutely. It\u2019s inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

While still not good enough, in the past four to five years AI technology has really taken off, Munsell said. The environment for further advances is ripe given the datasets and the fact that there is more computing power than ever before, he added.<\/p>\n

In conjunction with GEOINT 2023, NGA issued its AI vision statement, which outlines three challenges that must be overcome before achieving its \u201cprimary goal of producing GEOINT data and AI models of increasing accuracy that generate high-quality and useful detections to be applied to defense and intelligence missions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first challenge area is developing and adopting AI solutions, which it would appear NGA is tackling head on with the use of Maven. The second challenge area is around governance and prioritizes \u201cinvestments in labeling, algorithm development, inference compute, and label and data management.\u201d NGA\u2019s customers need to know that the AI applied to their missions is \u201cassured and secure\u201d so they can trust it, the agency says of the third challenge area.<\/p>\n

This article was first published by Via Satellite sister publication Defense Daily<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ST. LOUIS \u2014 There is no need to pause development of artificial intelligence (AI) despite recent advances that have alarmed experts and policy-makers about hidden dangers in the use of the technology because it currently is \u201cnot good enough\u201d and continued maturing of the technology will ultimately improve capabilities, an official with the National Geospatial-Intelligence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}