The Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) Joint Information Warfare (JIW) team developed and helped field AI malware detection and threat detection tools and is now looking to develop AI for the space realm.
Established in fiscal 2019 as JAIC’s Cyber Mission Initiative, the JIW initially focused on the cyber domain but in the last two years has expanded its focus to developing AI for electromagnetic spectrum, space, and intelligence operations.
Air Force Lt. Col. Andrew Wonpat, the acting head of JAIC’s JIW directorate, said the JIW has developed AI solutions for advanced threat detection, malware detection, and data normalization/stream analytics and has helped field the tools with the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Stream analytics are to ease the adoption of AI applications across weapons platforms.
“We are leaning forward very hard on taking capabilities that are within COTS and moving them quickly to our operational customers,” Wonpat said last week during the DoD AI Symposium.
One new area for the JIW is developing AI tools to enable advanced object recognition for space domain awareness.
“When we talked to U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command and other organizations in the space domain, space domain awareness was one of the top priorities so the JAIC, under JIW, we are partnering with SpaceCom/Space Force to understand how we can leverage AI so we can get space domain awareness,” Wonpat said. “That is a relatively recent effort. We’re kicking that off this fiscal year, and it will move into FY ’22. As an activity, we are re-purposing a capability from the cyber side and moving it over to support some of their space operations.”
U.S. Space Force (USSF) Chief of Space Operations Gen. John “Jay” Raymond has said that a top priority for him is improving the U.S. military’s space domain awareness.
Omitron and Parsons Corp. [PSN] are subcontractors on USSF Space and Missile Systems Center’s (SMC) ATLAS, which is to replace the Space Defense Operations Center (SPADOC), a space situational awareness computer system established in 1979 at the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado. The Air Force last upgraded SPADOC in 1989.
ATLAS is to harness machine-to-machine interfaces to accelerate the provision of space domain awareness data to USSF personnel.
In October 2018, SMC, then part of the U.S. Air Force, awarded a $53 million contract to L3Harris for ATLAS.