ADELPHI, Md. (Sept. 26, 2018) -- National and international researchers recently came together to share the work they have been conducting in the field of information science that has the potential to be game-changing for future warfighters conducting coalition operations.
The Distributed Analytics and Information Science International Technology Alliance Annual Fall Meeting was held Sept. 10-12 at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, New York.
Attendees, approximately 130 from participating organizations, included over 30 doctoral students.
The DAIS ITA is a collaborative alliance between the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, IBM (both U.S. and UK-based research groups co-lead the consortium), University of California, Los Angeles, Massachusetts-Amherst, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Stanford, Yale, Airbus, BAE Systems, Cardiff University, Imperial College London, Southampton and the University College London.
The alliance is jointly-led by Greg Cirincione from ARL and Helen Carlton from Dstl, and is a five year basic research effort (with a potential five year extension) with annual funding of $8 million per year, equally shared by the two governments.
Also in attendance were collaborators from the Navy Research Laboratory and a team of independent U.S. and UK academic, industry and government researchers who conducted an independent review of the program.
The peer review team briefed the alliance leadership following the meeting with generally positive comments about the innovative research and strong collaboration.
The meeting also included research paper presentations, posters and demonstrations by participants.
In addition, U.S. Army Col. Robert M. Ryan, deputy director of the Army Networks Cross-Functional Team, gave an overview of the CFT and discussed operational challenges facing the warfighter in future coalition settings, which provided a motivational context for the teams of academic, industry and government researchers.
According to Michael Frame, associate division chief in ARL's Network Science Division, the key technical challenges for the alliance are to enable dynamic coalitions that rapidly form teams from different partners to conduct missions in congested, constrained and adversarial environments while being adaptive to changing missions and membership; highly mobile and dynamic missions; and teams with different cultures, security policies and technologies.
"These challenges are key to future coalition operations and applicable to U.S. joint operations," Frame said.
Key research topics the alliance is focused on include distributed software-defined control of communications and computing resources; machine learning techniques to rapidly create generative security policies; dynamically-composed/positioned analytics; self-aware analytical services, and machine learning and adaptive reasoning for situational understanding.
"The DAIS ITA seeks to enhance future coalition operations and aligns with technology gaps associated with Army priorities in networks/ command, control, communications and intelligence," Frame said.
According to Frame, the expected outcomes of the alliance include software-defined coalition networking software that dynamically adapts to provide secure, resilient context-aware information systems; distributed analytics that integrates and exploits distributed and heterogeneous coalition data for rapid decision making; and distributed reasoning and machine learning to derive coalition situational understanding under adversarial constraints.
The next meeting is slated to be held in the UK in September 2019.
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The U.S. Army Research Laboratory is part of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, which has the mission to ensure decisive overmatch for unified land operations to empower the Army, the joint warfighter and our nation. RDECOM is a major subordinate command of the U.S. Army Materiel Command.
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