Artificial intelligence and technology (Getty images)
WASHINGTON — Just months after taking over parts of the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence project called Project Maven, the director of the National Geospatial Agency (NGA) said the agency has made “significant advances,” as it gets ready to become a program of record early next fiscal year.
“In the mere months since taking over the project, we’ve made important strides,” Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said Monday at the GEOINT 2023 conference. “We work closely with the combatant commands to integrate AI into workflows, accelerating operations and speed-to-decision. This benefits maritime domain awareness, target management and our ability to automatically search and detect objects of interest.”
He added that NGA has also refined its test and evaluation process and ensured Maven models “can run in other machine learning platforms.”
“The bottom line here is that under NGA’s watch, Maven… has made some of its most significant technological strides and has already contributed to some of our nation’s most important operations,” he said.
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Project Maven, which was established in 2017 and aims to speed up the use of AI across the military, was transferred over to both the NGA and the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office last year and is poised to become an official program of record in fiscal 2024.
Whitworth said the NGA is not “being hyperbolic when we say we’ve made some significant advances just in several months” and that the agency is “at peace now with this concept of actually leading a program of record in Maven.”
In April, the NGA released a solicitation saying it was looking at building out a platform to assess supply chain risks posed to AI and machine learning technologies for the project.
The agency listed specific requirements for the supply chain risk management platform, including integrating “algorithmic-based technology with Programs of Record, a rapid prototyping effort that adapts, prototypes, and integrates commercial AI technology into DoD platforms with active tactical users.”
Last April, NGA’s then-Director Vice Adm. Robert Sharp said a key focus area for the agency would be expanding Project Maven to combine “computer vision” with human expert analysis.
“Starting next fiscal year, will have complementary computer vision efforts that will deliver automated GEOINT detections to both intelligence analysts and warfighters,” Sharp said then. “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.”
