A strawman DARPA IT research strategy

Victoria Stavridou

Director, System Design Laboratory

SRI International

The need for a new IT strategy• 50 years after the Turing Test was posited, computers are still idiot savants

• DARPA is the only agency on the planet that can change that!

• America will never be the same again post 911

• The Quadrennial Defense Review Report and the continuing Revolution in Military Affairs

• EO 13231 - Critical Infrastructure Protection in the Information Age

• Current “fog” over ITO mission and programs

It is time for a fresh start!

A new IT strategy

Systems that Think:Truly intelligent,

pervasive, hardened, computers

A transformationalcapability

Missile defense

Info Ops

Power projection

Information exploitation

Space systems

Joint C4ISR

Joint operations

Experiments

Intelligenceexploitation

RMAQDR pillars QDR Initiatives

Intelligent systems today: From the human to the machine

Endowing machines with basic human abilities (vision, speech, NLP,simple reasoning) so that they can handle simple tasks and communicatewith humans better

Tomorrow: Systems that think

Higher brain functions(reasoning, inventing, collaborating,planning, learning)

The intelligence is in the coalition

From computers as servants to computers as mentors

Computers return the favor:they augment human intellect

Extreme Teams

PeopleMachinesInformationProcess

People team with intelligent machines

Improve missioneffectiveness 100 fold Perform hithertoimpossible missions Reduce casualties 100 fold

Keeping the edge• Systems that think are critical to DARPA’s mission and the

continuing RMA• An Intelligent Systems Office is needed to focus on and to

realize the vision• Program portfolio needs to be well structured:

– foundational (eg test and measurement)– infrastructure (eg picoOS, FAST, DASADA)– capability oriented (eg speech recognition, infosensors)– mission oriented (eg early warning)

• Keep the effort in one office for critical mass, team building and crucially, for research context

• Tech transfer into the military and the Information Offices

ISO vision structure and goals

Measurement & Evaluation, dependability, ontology learning,bioinspiredcomputing, dynamic composition, ensemble programming, s/w engineering

Networks (bioinspired, ad hoc), resource discovery, heterogeneousdynamic computing coalitions, wireless, security & privacy, fault

management, operating systems, interoperability, embedded systems

Natural language, vision, speech, reasoning,coherent perception, autonomy, adaptivity, robustness

Systems that think:Intelligent, pervasive, hardened computers

A defining military mission

IXO Cyberhabitats (collaborative campaign planning)

TTO Deceptor (hybrid battlefield)

Missions

Paradigm

Capabilities

Infra-structure

Foundations

IAO Infosensor(Early warning)

Strawman ISO Charter

Post PC ArtificialIntelligence

Trustedsystems

Biocomputing

Foundations

Systems that think