Updates from Applied's Government team
Contract wins, speaking engagements, and recent news.
The Nexus Newsletter
Welcome to the second edition of The Nexus Newsletter - a bi-weekly email newsletter covering recent announcements from Applied Intuition and important news bridging national security and autonomy.
This edition of the newsletter includes a few recent updates from the government team at Applied Intuition and news that we are tracking.
Government team updates
The government team at Applied Intuition is making waves in and around Washington, D.C. Here are a few updates that you might be interested in:
Applied Intuition won phase 1 of the U.S. Army’s xTech Detect Competition
The competition’s goal is to help the Army engage and integrate world-class commercial technologies that tackle critical modernization challenges, and provide expertise to accelerate technologies of interest to the Department of Defense.Applied Intuition spoke at the Military Robotics & Autonomous Systems USA conference
As a proud sponsor of the conference, we enjoyed engaging with senior leaders from the Department of Defense, industry, and a range of international partners to discuss their vision for acquiring, integrating, and deploying effective autonomous systems. Applied’s Director of Government Colin Carroll spoke about the importance of software-driven development to building successful autonomy programs at DOD, what that looks like in practice, the infrastructure required, and steps DOD can take to bring autonomy programs up to date.
News we’re reading
Understanding of the importance of autonomous systems to national security is growing, both in the United States and internationally, as are efforts to ensure that those systems are developed and deployed in an ethical and responsible manner. Here are a few of the articles that Applied Intuition’s government team is tracking:
FedScoop | Pentagon unveils long-awaited plan for implementing ‘responsible AI’
On June 22, 2022, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks signed the DOD’s Responsible AI (RAI) Strategy and Implementation (S&I) Pathway. The document outlines the Pentagon’s approach for operationalizing its AI Ethical Principles, establishes action items surrounding test and evaluation requirements, and defines a framework for how DOD will implement AI in a lawful, ethical, and accountable manner.
The pathway puts a strong emphasis on testing and evaluation. The second tenet, warfighter trust, reads: “Ensure warfighter trust by providing education and training, establishing a test and evaluation and verification and validation (TEVV) framework that integrates real-time monitoring, algorithm confidence metrics, and user feedback to ensure trusted and trustworthy AI capabilities.”
“As the DOD embraces AI, it remains focused on the imperative of harnessing this technology in a manner consistent with our national values, shared democratic ideals, and our military’s steadfast commitment to lawful and ethical behavior,” officials wrote in the new pathway.
Breaking Defense | Army robotics official: More autonomy could ease battlefield bandwidth worries
The way the US military envisions future conflicts, data will perennially criss-cross the battlefield, creating a next-generation vulnerability: bandwidth bottlenecks. The Army, however, sees autonomous systems as one potential avenue to free up valuable space. “As we get autonomy onto those robots, we will be reducing the amount of bandwidth required,” said Ted Maciuba, Deputy Director of Robotics Requirements at Army Futures Command. For things humans need to see, Maciuba continued, robots will identify “militarily interesting” findings and build a battlefield visualization: “You can think of it as a synthetic environment. …a synthetic view of what is actually going on, because we cannot afford the bandwidth to build a real-world view.”
Government of the United Kingdom | Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy
The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) recently unveiled its strategy to (1), transform the MoD into an AI-ready organization; (2), adopt and exploit AI at pace and scale for defense advantage; (3), strengthen the UK’s defense and security AI ecosystem; and (4), shape global AI developments to promote security, stability, and democratic values.
Breaking Defense | Navy to begin key competition for unmanned, autonomy efforts
The Navy is poised to begin a competition among industry for the Navy’s Autonomy Baseline Manager, which is intended to streamline the process for making sure that each of the myriad unmanned vessels currently under development is capable of working in conjunction with one another. A five year contract is scheduled to be awarded in summer 2023.
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