Army turns to artificial intelligence to counter electronic attacks - SpaceNews.com

The Army offered a $100,000 prize for a solution to an increasingly tough problem for commanders in the field: In a battlefield dense with electromagnetic signals, is there a better way to distinguish friendly transmissions from hostile attacks? There is, according to a team of eight engineers from Aerospace Corporation, based in El Segundo, Calif. They won the prize by correctly detecting and classifying the greatest number of radio frequency signals using a combination of signal processing and artificial intelligence algorithms. The competition, known as the "Blind Signal Classification Challenge," was sponsored by the Army's Rapid Capabilities Office, a small organization that looks for ways to apply commercial technology to solve military problems. When the challenge kicked off in April, the Army gave all 49 competitors a large amount of recordings of various types of radio signals to use as "training data" so they could develop their algorithms.