AI Helps the Pentagon Solve Problems Faster

Following news of the event, the U.S. military is dispatched to an area where residents speak a little-known language with multiple dialects. En route to the site, the emergency team feeds the location and the region's primary linguistics into a database that deciphers enough conversation to enable military commanders to communicate with local leaders. Such a capability would offer U.S. officials a chance at triage before a humanitarian aid effort begins and, in the process, improve recovery efforts, says John Launchbury, the former director of the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pentagon leaders now say this kind of machine learning and data analysis is critical to maintaining military effectiveness. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows technology to evolve as it absorbs new information.