IPTO :: Thrust Areas

IPTO :: Thrust Areas

Thrust Areas Cognitive Systems Cognitive computing is the development of computer techniques to emulate human perception, intelligence and problem solving. Cognitive systems offer some important advantages over conventional computing approaches. For example, cognitive systems can learn from events that occur in the real world and so are better suited to applications that require extracting and organizing information in complex unstructured scenarios than conventional computing systems, which must have the right models built in a priori in order to be effective. Because many of challenges faced by military commanders involve vast amounts of data from sensors, databases, the Web and human sources, IPTO is creating cognitive systems that can learn and reason to structure massive amounts of raw data into useful, organized knowledge with a minimum of human assistance. IPTO is implementing cognitive technology in systems that support warfighters in the decision-making, management, and understanding of complexity in traditional and emergent military missions. These cognitive systems will understand what the user is really trying to do and provide proactive intelligence, assistance and advice. Finally, the increasing complexity, rigidity, fragility and vulnerability of modern information technology has led to ever-growing manpower requirements for IT support. The incorporation of cognitive capabilities in information systems will enable them to self-monitor, self-correct, and self-defend as they experience software coding errors, hardware faults and cyber-attack. Command & Control Command and control is the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commander over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of a mission. Without question the missions faced by our warfighters today (such as counter-insurgency) and the operational environments (such as cities) are more complex and dangerous than ever before. While following their rules of engagement, warfighters must make rapid decisions based on limited observables interpreted in the context of the evolving situation. Command and control systems must augment the observables within constrained timelines and present actionable results to the warfighter. IPTO enables warfigter success by creating technologies and systems that provide tailored, consistent, predictive situation awareness across all command elements, and continuous synchronization of sensing, strike, communications, and logistics to maximize the effectiveness of military operations while minimizing undesirable side effects. In counter-insurgency operations, targets of interest are often not known until a significant event (e.g. detonation of IED) occurs. In those instances, reliably and quickly determining the origin of the devices/vehicles becomes the key to preventing subsequent attacks. IPTO is creating systems that collect wide area observables in the absence of any strong a priori cues, analyze the prior time history of events and track insurgent activities to their point of origin. High Productivity Computing IPTO is developing the high-productivity, high-performance computer hardware and the associated software technology base required to support future critical national security needs for computationally-intensive and data-intensive applications. These technologies will lead to new multi-generation product lines of commercially viable, sustainable computing systems for a broad spectrum of scientific and engineering applications, including both supercomputer and embedded computing. The goal is to ensure accessibility and usability of high end computing to a wide range of application developers, not just computational science experts. This is essential for maintaining the nation's strength in supercomputing both for ultra large-scale engineering applications and for surveillance and reconnaissance data assimilation and exploitation. One of the major challenges currently facing the DoD is the prohibitively high cost, time, and expertise required to build large complex software systems. Powerful new approaches and tools are needed to enable the rapid and efficient production of new software, including software that can be easily changed to address new requirements and to platform and environmental perturbations. Computing capabilities must progress dramatically if U.S. forces are to exploit an ever-increasing diversity, quantity, and complexity of sensor and other types of data. Doing so both in command centers and on the battlefield will require significantly increasing performance and significantly decreasing power and size requirements. Language Processing At present, the exploitation of foreign language speech and text is slow and labor intensive and as a result, the availability, quantity and timeliness of information from foreign-language sources is limited. IPTO is creating new technologies and systems for automating the transcription and translation of foreign languages. These language processing capabilities will enable our military to exploit large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, thereby increasing situational awareness at all levels of command. In particular, IPTO is automating the capability to monitor foreign language media and to exploit foreign language news broadcasts with one-way (foreign-language-to-English) translation technologies. IPTO is also developing hand-held, two-way (foreign-language-to-English and English-to-foreign-language) speech-to-speech translation systems that enable the warfighter on the ground to communicate directly with local populations in their native language. Finally, IPTO is creating technologies to exploit the information contained in hard-copy documents and document images resident on magnetic and optical media captured in the field. Making full use of all of the information extracted from foreign-language sources requires the capability to automatically collate, filter, synthesize, summarize, and present relevant information in timely and relevant forms. IPTO is developing natural language processing systems to enhance local, regional and global situational awareness and eliminate the need for translators and subject matter experts at every military site where foreign-language information is obtained. Sensors & Processing U.S. forces and sensors are increasingly networked across service, location, domain (land, sea and air), echelon, and platform. This trend increases responsiveness, flexibility and combat effectiveness, but also increases the inherent complexity of sensor and information management. IPTO is creating systems that can derive high-level information from sensor data streams (from both manned and unmanned systems), produce meaningful summaries of complex dynamic situations, and scale to thousands of sources. Future battlefields will continue to be populated with targets that use mobility and concealment as key survival tactics, and high-value targets will range from quiet submarines, to mobile missile/artillery, to specific individual insurgents. IPTO develops and demonstrates system concepts that combine novel approaches to sensing, sensor processing, sensor fusion, and information management to enable pervasive and persistent surveillance of the battlespace and detection, identification, tracking, engagement and battle damage assessment for high-value targets in all weather conditions and in all possible combat environments. Finally, warfighters in the field must concentrate on observing their immediate environment but at the same time must maintain awareness of the larger battlespace picture, and as a result they are susceptible to being swamped by too much detail. IPTO is creating system approaches that can exploit context and advanced information display/presentation techniques to overcome these challenges. Emerging Technologies IPTO is exploring several emerging information processing technologies including novel uses of modeling and simulation to create new battle command paradigms; revolutionary approaches to power, size and programmability as enablers for computing at the exascale; computational social science as the foundation for better understanding of the world faced by the warfighter; advanced sensing architectures including new sensing modalities to counter difficult threats; automated storage, indexing, analysis, correlation, search, and retrieval of multimedia data; and techniques to enable information sharing across organizational boundaries and administrative/security domains.