The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wants to leverage machine learning to improve its ability to verify marine species. NOAA's Fisheries Sampling Branch is responsible for monitoring and observing fishing in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic. Over the last 25 years, FSB has worked to make this identification easier for its observers -- who started out taking pictures of samples of frozen fish with film cameras, noting the location and focusing on the unique characteristics that allow differentiation of each fish species, such as whole body, gills or fins. The images were submitted within 48 hours and verified by other observers. Currently, images -- which still vary greatly in quality due to different cameras, photographic conditions and characteristics of the species -- are upload to the Fish House, a web-based user interface for a Oracle relational database that is used for species verification.

The US government thinks the military could help whip the country's 5G industry into shape. Michael Kratsios, the acting undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, Thursday laid out a plan to turn US military bases into sandboxes for 5G experimentation. He also described a vision for advancing US military use of 5G, microelectronics, and artificial intelligence technology to counter one big threat--China. "An emboldened and increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party is building and deploying some of the most advanced weapons," Kratsios said in remarks prepared for a virtual event hosted by Georgetown University. He said China is using its "newfound economic and technological power to undermine our safety, our security, and our freedom."

The report, which is a compilation of 97 countries' position on fully automated weapons, says most of them want to "retain human control over the use of force". Additionally, a growing number of policymakers, artificial intelligence experts, private companies, international and domestic organisations, and ordinary individuals have also endorsed the call to ban fully autonomous weapons. The authors explain that autonomous weapons "would decide who lives and dies, without … inherently human characteristics such as compassion that are necessary to make complex ethical choices."

Northrop Grumman Corporation was recently awarded a contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) for the Gamebreaker program. This innovative program seeks to develop and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to existing real-time strategy games to break a complex model or create an imbalance. Northrop Grumman will use this opportunity to evaluate and develop technology to improve flexible planning, optimization and discovery in products that operate dynamic environments. "Using AI to exploit engagement models can help to enable intelligent systems that could in turn enhance military strategy," said Susan Wilson, director, intelligent mission capabilities and advanced technology laboratory, Northrop Grumman. "We are exploring how we may be able to use this methodology in the future."

The Defense Information Systems Agency awarded a $106 million contract to Deloitte Consulting to build the Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub's AI development platform, the U.S. Department of Defense announced Aug. 12. The company will "design and build" the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's Joint Common Foundation, a capability that DoD AI leadership has stated will be integral in developing, testing and fielding AI capabilities. The contract has a one-year base period worth $31 million with three option years through August 2024. Work is scheduled to start Aug. 17, according to Lt. Cmdr. "The Joint Common Foundation will provide an AI development environment to test, validate and field AI capabilities at scale across the Department of Defense," Abrahamson said. "The impact of the JCF will come from enterprise‐wide access to AI tools and data for AI developers across the Department and its partners that will help synchronize AI projects, reduce development redundancy and enable the broad deployment of AI-enabled solutions to the tactical edge where front line operators can benefit from these capabilities."

Welcome to General Intelligence, OneZero's weekly dive into the A.I. news and research that matters. War robots today take just too much darn time to control. I know it, you know it, and the U.S. Army knows it. That's why its research branch is cooking up a system that would allow soldiers to give orders to small robotic cars by speaking naturally, as opposed to using specific commands. The robots would be able to understand the soldiers' intent and complete the given task, according to an Army press release.

Cyber attacks and threats are considered major disruptors to businesses, nations and consumers alike. Artificial intelligence is seen as a major disruptive force too, but of the positive kind, fuelling a new era of hyper connectivity, hyper intelligence and hyper performance. An increasingly complex business environment is leading organisations to embrace forms of artificial intelligence such as machine learning and facial recognition technology, while using data to build more intimate relationships with consumers. But the flip side of these innovations is that the'attack surfaces' of an organisation are multiplying, creating a fast-growing world of vulnerability to cyber crime that didn't exist before. At the same time, AI use is on the rise among cyber criminals, who are using it to help drive attacks, employing the technology to uncover unsecured points of entry in enterprise networks.

Starting a new life is difficult for criminals transitioning from prison back to regular society. To help those individuals, Purdue University Polytechnic Institute researchers are using artificial intelligence to uncover risky behaviors which could then help identify when early intervention opportunities could be beneficial. Results of a U.S. Department of Justice study indicated more than 80 percent of people in state prisons were arrested at least once in the nine years following their release. Almost half of those arrests came in the first year following release. Marcus Rogers and Umit Karabiyik of Purdue Polytechnic's Department of Computer and Information Technology, are leading an ongoing project focused on using AI-enabled tools and technology to reduce the recidivism rates for convicted criminals who have been released.

At the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin, researchers designed an algorithm that allows an autonomous ground vehicle to improve its existing navigation systems by watching a human drive. The team tested its approach -- called adaptive planner parameter learning from demonstration, or APPLD -- on one of the Army's experimental autonomous ground vehicles. "Using approaches like APPLD, current Soldiers in existing training facilities will be able to contribute to improvements in autonomous systems simply by operating their vehicles as normal," said Army researcher Dr. Garrett Warnell. "Techniques like these will be an important contribution to the Army's plans to design and field next-generation combat vehicles that are equipped to navigate autonomously in off-road deployment environments." Rather than replacing a classical system altogether, APPLD learns how to tune the existing system to behave more like the human demonstration.

A lot of this could be attributed to the vulnerability businesses offer the cybercriminals to take advantage of the situation quickly. While the conventional cybersecurity approach has benefited many, having cybersecurity without cyber-intelligence and necessary awareness can put the security professionals off-guarded to more complicated and novel threats. Furthermore, with limited cybersecurity resources, businesses need to prioritise their efforts to strengthen cyber posture effectively; however, many organisations do not have an anchor point or a guiding principle, to begin with. With cyber-intelligence inputs missing from cybersecurity capabilities like incident management, vulnerability management, risk assessment and brand monitoring, businesses end up running their security practice in silos instead of an integrated approach. And, thus, in an attempt to revolutionise the cyber threat visibility and intelligence market, CYFIRMA, a cyber analytics startup assists businesses to understand the relevance of the current threat landscape.