Google is not only applying machine learning across its products, but also encouraging other developers to adopt it in third-party services and other use cases. It has now emerged that one of the latter examples is for drones from the U.S. government. Gizmodo this morning reported on a Google partnership last year with the U.S. Department of Defense to improve the latter organization's adoption of machine learning. The DoD's Project Maven is tasked with identifying objects in drone footage. Google supplied the military with TensorFlow APIs, which it notes in a statement are open source.

Google is offering resources to the US Department of Defense for a "pilot project" to analyze drone footage using artificial intelligence. The collaboration was first reported in a story by Gizmodo, which noted that some Google employees had been "outraged" by the news after it was shared in an internal mailing list last week. Details regarding what Google is actually providing to the DOD are not clear, but we know the work is part of Project Maven -- a Pentagon research initiative to develop computer vision that can better understand video footage. Such technology could have a range of uses in the military, including helping to surveil and track targets using drones and providing the brains for static CCTV cameras in military camps and bases. Technology of this sort can be used to recognize basic objects, like cars and people, but has trouble analyzing complex scenes.