DARPA wants to teach machines how to learn -- GCN

"When we look at what's happening with artificial intelligence, we see something that is very, very powerful, very valuable for military applications, but we also see a technology that is still quite fundamentally limited," DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said at the Atlantic Council on May 2. Aiming to define those limits, a new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program will try to answer a singular question: "What are the fundamental limitations inherent in machine learning systems?" Through a series of research areas of interest, the Fundamental Limits of Learning, or Fun LoL, program will assess the potential of focused investigations by developing, validating and applying a theoretical framework for learning, according to the recently released request for information. The two primary research areas focus on articulating a general mathematical framework to measure learning and applying that framework to existing machine learning methods to characterize capabilities of current techniques. Machines can master chess, Jeopardy! Because complex threats require machines to adapt and learn quickly, it is important that they be able to generalize creatively from previously learned concepts.