Bit by bit, byte by byte, artificial intelligence has been working its way into public consciousness and into everyday computer use. Artificial intelligence and deep learning have been deeply woven into more and more aspects of end-user computing. Smartphones and other mobile devices use AI as well. Up until now, the artificial intelligence work has been done in the cloud, but a new approach to software design aims to arm mobile devices with real artificial-intelligence capability. "A mobile device is very resource-constrained," explained William & Mary computer scientist Bin Ren.

Ongoing projects for the artificial intelligence (AI) push, Shanahan told attendees, include predictive maintenance for the H-60 helicopter; humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, with an initial emphasis on wildfires and flooding; cyber sense-making, focusing on event detection, user activity monitoring, and network mapping; information operations; and intelligent business automation. The biggest project for fiscal year 2020, he said, is what the Pentagon is calling AI for maneuver and fires: "With individual lines of effort or product lines oriented on warfighting operations; for example, operations intelligence fusion, joint all-domain command and control, accelerated sensor-to-shooter timelines, autonomous and swarming systems, target development, and operations center workflows. "We are also embarking with DIU [Defense Innovation Unit] and the services' Surgeons General, as well as many others, on a predictive health project," Shanahan stated, "with several proposed lines of effort, to include health records analysis, medical imagery classification and PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] mitigation/suicide prevention. Our other major effort, one that is instrumental to our AI center of excellence concept, is what we are calling the Joint Common Foundation, or JCF. The JCF will be a platform that will provide access to data, tools, environments, libraries and to other certified platforms to enable software and AI engineers to rapidly develop, evaluate, test and deploy AI-enabled solutions to warfighters.