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WASHINGTON — Operating under a continuing resolution is the “one thing” preventing the full transition of parts of the Defense Department’s marquee artificial intelligence program to its new Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO), a senior official from the office said today.
According to President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 budget request to Congress, portions of Project Maven, a program formerly known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team established in 2017 to speed the use of AI across the military, were designated to be transitioned from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to the CDAO and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
Beyond the budget, the Pentagon has been relatively quiet about the future of Project Maven. In April, then-NGA Director Vice. Adm. Robert Sharp said his agency would gain “operational control of Project Maven’s GEOINT AI services from the Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.” The non-GEOINT portions of the project, then, would go to CDAO.
Speaking at the Association of Old Crows conference today, Deputy CDAO Margaret Palmieri suggested the NGA part was chugging along, but the CDAO had hit a congressional roadblock.
“We always appreciate on-time appropriations and that allows us to keep our transition plans on track. That’s really the one thing that has prevented the total transition is that CR, and we’re just waiting to go through that process,” Palmieri said. “But I will say that the teams are up and running at NGA, they are ready to go. We are excited to see what they’re putting together. We have conversations with them pretty frequently.”
Palmieri added the pieces of data she thinks have been “revolutionary” with Project Maven have been in the computer vision and GEOINT space.
In April, Sharp described the computer vision as efforts that will “deliver automated GEOINT detections to both intelligence analysts and warfighters.”
“In our key role as a Combat Support Agency, we’ll provide the subject matter experts — humans who can train the machine evaluate it and make sense of the output. We’ll bring together those disparate sometimes siloed communities of machine learning experts, data scientists, GIS experts and imagery analysts to improve AI model performance, develop standards and lead interoperability efforts for the GEOINT community,” he said.
As for what CDAO will do with its portion of the project once it gets past the budgetary hurdles, Palmieri was more tight-lipped.
“Pieces that are not intel, well not GEOINT, I should say, will stay in the CDAO,” she said. “And there are some other capabilities that I can’t talk about here, but we will look at how to build out the same type of approach Maven used for these non-GEOINT type use cases.”
