Naval Research Lab brainstorms plan to tackle AI's data-centric challenges

The Defense Department has pinned its hopes on someday putting artificial intelligence tools in the hands of warfighters to help them make data-driven decisions on the battlefield, but given the current state of the technology and the dearth of training data that algorithms need, that goal appears difficult to achieve in the short-term. The defense community, including the Defense AI Center stood up last year, have rolled out AI pilots on everything from predictive maintenance of aircraft and vehicles to autonomous ships. For all of DoD's aspirational projects, AI tools tend not to fare well in situations where data is spare or not structured in a way that the algorithm can't process. Ranjeev Mittu, the head of the Naval Research Lab's information management and decision architectures branch, said the AI algorithms of today are starved for reliable training data to make informed decisions in the real world. "It's not really clear how much data is needed under what scenarios, for what kinds of problems yet, and I think it's kind of emerging. There's a lot of research going on, but I think fundamentally there's still a lot more research that needs to be done in the relationship between data and training, and what the right tradeoffs are for the different kinds of problems," Mittu said in an interview with Federal News Network.