Artificial Intelligence Can Hunt Down Missile Sites in China Hundreds of Times Faster Than Humans

Intelligence agencies have a limited number of trained human analysts looking for undeclared nuclear facilities, or secret military sites, hidden among terabytes of satellite images. But the same sort of deep learning artificial intelligence that enables Google and Facebook to automatically filter images of human faces and cats could also prove invaluable in the world of spy versus spy. An early example: US researchers have trained deep learning algorithms to identify Chinese surface-to-air missile sites--hundreds of times faster than their human counterparts. The deep learning algorithms proved capable of helping people with no prior imagery analysis experience find surface-to-air missile sites scattered across nearly 90,000 square kilometers of southeastern China. Such AI based on neural networks--layers of artificial neuron capable of filtering and learning from huge amounts of data--matched the overall 90 percent accuracy of expert human imagery analysts in locating the missile sites.