DARPA's RACER program has been developing off-road autonomous combat vehicles that can travel as fast as crewed systems. The agency has now selected Intel to develop a simulation platform for these off-road AVs. The aim of the project, known as RACER-Sim, is to create computer models that mimic the type of rugged, unstructured terrain that these vehicles commonly encounter. Intel Labs will work with the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona and the University of Texas at Austin to craft these simulation tools. "We brought together a team of renowned experts from the Computer Vision Center and UT Austin with the goal of creating a versatile and open platform to accelerate progress in off-road ground robots for all types of environments and conditions," said Intel's Autonomous Agents Lab director German Ros in a statement.

U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command lack the artificial intelligence capabilities needed to do their jobs to the fullest and maintain an edge over rival nations, according to the leader of both organizations. "My assessment today is I don't have what I need, as far as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to give the decision space to the president, secretary of defense, the chief of defense staff in Canada, the minister of defense and the prime minister in Canada," Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck said at a Defense Writers Group event April 25. The former is responsible for guarding the continental U.S. and its surroundings. The latter combines U.S. and Canadian efforts to monitor and protect North American airspace, among other things. NORTHCOM recently asked Congress for an additional $29.8 million to buy information technology equipment and to optimize infrastructure for AI and machine learning at its joint operations center with NORAD.

On Monday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an assassination attempt targeting Russian journalists had been foiled. In a sting operation, the FSB, Russia's domestic security service, had arrested the would-be neo-Nazi assassins, he said. Among the arsenal apparently seized by the FSB were Molotov cocktails, a grenade, several pistols and a sawed-off shotgun, as well as Nazi paraphernalia, a green wig and copies of three expansion packs to the video game "The Sims 3." Wait.

The Reviewer -- James Voorhees is a cyber analyst with General Dynamics Information Technology. He has extensive experience as an analyst and engineer working on cybersecurity, mostly for federal agencies. He holds a PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is the author of Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference. BOOK REVIEW -- Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. For some, it is a technology that promises transformative progress.

The Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of its Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD) program, which is designed to develop new defenses against adversarial attacks on machine learning (ML) models. The program aims to respond to adversarial AI by developing a testbed to characterize different ML defenses and assess their applicability. Researchers on the program have created resources and virtual tools for the community to be able to test and verify the effectiveness of existing and emerging ML defense models. "Other technical communities – like cryptography – have embraced transparency and found that if you are open to letting people take a run at things, the technology will improve," GARD program manager Bruce Draper said in the announcement. "With GARD, we are taking a page from cryptography and are striving to create a community to facilitate the open exchange of ideas, tools, and technologies that can help researchers test and evaluate their ML defenses. Our goal is to raise the bar on existing evaluation efforts, bringing more sophistication and maturation to the field."

Despite the official policy of pacifism, which outlaws war as a means to settle international disputes, Japan is now looking to acquire attack drones for its arsenal. This comes amid Tokyo's increasing concerns over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its territorial disputes with Moscow over the Kuril Islands. Japanese defense officials are considering buying drones as they believe these rudimentary weapons are not only impactful but also "cost-effective and easy to deploy," reported South China Morning Post. "There is no doubt that reconnaissance and attack functionality using a multitude of low-cost'swarm drones' would be militarily advantageous," Yoshihide Yoshida, chief of staff of the Ground Self-Defence Forces, was quoted by the news outlet. Japan had already taken the first step in this regard when it began using U.S.-built drones to identify and track ships across the Pacific last year.

The Department of Defense today announced that the Pentagon has hired Lyft Inc. head of machine learning Craig Martell as its first-ever chief digital and artificial intelligence officer. Martell will head up the DOD's Chief Digital and AI Office, which was created in December in order to centralize oversight of its data and AI initiatives under a single office in the Pentagon. As the person in charge of the CDAO, Martell will report directly to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. The CDAO launched with limited operational capability in February and is expected to achieve full operational capability by the end of June, FedScoop reported. He also has prior U.S. military experience thanks to his service as a tenured computer science professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, where he specialized in natural language processing.

For the past decade, artificial intelligence has been used to recognize faces, rate creditworthiness and predict the weather. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated hacks using stealthier methods have escalated. The combination of AI and cybersecurity was inevitable as both fields sought better tools and new uses for their technology. But there's a massive problem that threatens to undermine these efforts and could allow adversaries to bypass digital defenses undetected. The danger is data poisoning: manipulating the information used to train machines offers a virtually untraceable method to get around AI-powered defenses.

When the Russian warship Moskva sank in the Black Sea south of Ukraine, some 500 crew members were reportedly on board. The Russian state held a big ceremony for the surviving sailors and officers who were on the ship. But, considering Russia's history of being not exactly truthful when it comes to events like this, many people wondered whether these were actual sailors from Moskva. Toler is director of research and training for Bellingcat, the group that specializes in open-source and social media investigations. He used facial recognition software to identify the men in the video through images in Russian social media, and found that most of the men were indeed sailors from Sevastopol, the town the ship was operating out of.

A statement from Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Chair Charlotte Burrows in late October 2021 announced the employment agency's launch of an initiative to ensure artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging tools used in hiring and other employment decisions comply with federal civil rights laws. "The EEOC is keenly aware that [artificial intelligence and algorithmic decision-making] tools may mask and perpetuate bias or create new discriminatory barriers to jobs. We must work to ensure that these new technologies do not become a high-tech pathway to discrimination," Burrows said. The EEOC is not alone in its concerns about the use of AI, machine learning and related technologies in employment decision-making activities. On March 25, 2022, California's Fair Employment and Housing Council discussed draft regulations regarding automated-decision systems.