GEOINT and Machine Learning

Dr. Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), gave the first keynote at USGIF's Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Workshop Jan. 10 in Herndon, Va., with a strong articulation of why nearly 300 people were gathered for a day of presentations and discussion. "We're well past the point that it would've been possible for an agency of human analysts or 17 agencies of human analysts to have enough brains and eyeballs to perform their mission," Matheny said. "So finding some way of bringing machines to scale up and address our problems is a way of bridging the gap between the resources we have and the resources we need. It allows us to focus human brains and eyeballs on the problems where they're most needed." Machine learning (ML) progress accelerated in the last several years and has been especially celebrated in the case of deep learning, according to Matheny.