More technologically knowledgeable stakeholders and committed leadership within the federal government are critical to successfully implementing scalable artificial intelligence technology in public offices. Speaking during a virtual panel discussion, officials including Jack Shanahan, the inaugural director of the Department of Defense's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, discussed the need for modernization advocates in federal agencies, specifically needing a "disrupter" helming the implementation of new software. "If this is really the first big AI project designed to go fast and to go to scale, you need almost a classic glass breaker type of person that's just going to plow over all those bureaucratic obstacles," he explained. He added that agency leaders and deputies need to be completely on board with new technology rollouts to help ensure that adequate oversight and accountability is present in artificial intelligence acquisitions. Shanahan also noted that more employees with a technical aptitude are vital.

Ian Fitzgerald is an M.A. student in International Security at George Mason University with research interests in Great Power Competition, Cyber Warfare, Emerging Technologies, Russia and China. ACADEMIC INCUBATOR -- The explosion of data available to today's analysts creates a compelling need to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into intelligence work. The objective of the Intelligence Community (IC) is to analyze, connect, apply context, infer meaning, and ultimately, make analytical judgments based on that data. The data explosion offers an incredible source of potential information, but it also creates issues for the IC. Today's intelligence analysts find themselves working from an information-scarce environment to one with an information surplus.

The Central Intelligence Agency announced Monday the launch of its first-ever federal lab, a new internal organization that will allow its officers to obtain patents and licenses for intellectual property they create while working at the agency. The new office, called CIA Labs, will be an in-house research and development office through which the spy agency will develop the future technology it needs for intelligence collection for national security, while also helping U.S. economic security, according to Dawn Meyerriecks, head of CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology, in an agency press release. In a speech last week at the Intelligence and National Security Summit, Meyerriecks listed several broad areas where the agency has intellectual property that could "change the conversation" around key emerging technologies. She listed 5G, battery technology, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning, computation, geospatial information representation, navigation, and analytics as areas of focus. "It's an endless list that we collectively own, but the world desperately needs," Meyerriecks said.

America's most famous spy agency has a major competitor it can't quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley. The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realized--and it wants to lead in fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. However, recruiting and retaining the talent capable of building these tools is a challenge on many levels, especially since a spy agency can't match Silicon Valley salaries, reputations, and patents. The agency's solution is CIA Labs, a new skunkworks that will attempt to recruit and retain technical talent by offering incentives to those who work there. Under the new initiative, announced today, CIA officers will be able for the first time to publicly file patents on the intellectual property they work on--and collect a portion of the the profits.

The American security agency CIA knows that the future can't go without artificial intelligence. The agency was all over the news last year because of Wikileaks which published their collection of hacking tools. CIA wants to deal with foreign spies, not human but AI-powered spies tracking CIA agents deployed overseas. An effective countermeasure would be using technology instead of humans to get the required intel. At a conference in Florida, CIA's Science and Technology division deputy director Dawn Meyerriecks talked about their AI developments without going into the details.

Human spies will soon be relics of the past, and the CIA knows it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Agency's deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida the CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent. Meyerriecks, speaking to CNN after the conference, said other countries have relied on AI to track enemy agents for years. She went on to explain the difficulties encountered by current CIA spies trying to live under an assumed identity in the era of digital tracking and social media, indicating the modern world is becoming an inhospitable environment to human spies. But the CIA isn't about to give up.

What will happen to a person's artificial intelligence (AI) when they retire? When a prospective employee interviews for a job, will his or her AI be questioned alongside them? Will companies hire AI straight from a factory, or will the system undergo a sort of apprenticeship before being put to work? More importantly--and more realistic in the near-term--what will be the line at which machines are not reliable enough or morally appropriate to use and humans take over? These, along with many more immediate questions, are among the topics USGIF's Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Working Group seeks to generate discussion around.

The CIA is making use of several artificial intelligence (AI) programs that access, gather, and retrieve social media intelligence for the agency. In a statement reported by Futurism, Dawn Meyerriecks, the deputy director for technology development with the CIA said at the Intelligence and National Security Summit that the agency had over 137 AI projects as part of "In-Q-Tel" where a large portion of it is created through collaborations with Silicon Valley firms. With greater ability and power to analyse data, AI programs thus created have reportedly taken to social media platforms and "comb through" all public records –all the stuff that is posted by people using social media. It is reported that a large percentage of the data that the CIA collects comes from various social media platforms. While the very act of collecting data from social media is by no means new, making use of AI to do this is.

Last week, Vladimir Putin told students, "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." That caught the interest of noted AI phobe / profiteer Elon Musk who tweeted, simply and ominously: "It begins…" But the CIA's head of technology development has a different take. Dawn Meyerriecks is less worried about rival nation states might use AI to outflank the United States than about getting U.S. leaders to believe what AI is telling them. "If I want to increase [ certainty in a particular AI-aided assessment] what goes into it? What do I need in order to make a really good assessment on the back-end because that tells me what sort of collection I need to raise confidence to go address national leadership?"

Provided by AFP The US National Security Agency, which operates this ultra-secure data collection center in Utah, is one of the key US spying operations turning to artifical intelligence to help make sense of massive amounts of digital data they collect every day. Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action.