While technology giants have been leveraging and experimenting with Artificial Intelligence for years, the UK's defense is also looking forward on to take advantage of the growing trend..
UK's Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), the agency funded by the Ministry of Defense, is aiming to tap into machine learning by launching its first data science challenge.
"Increasingly over the last few years, we've realized that actually, we've got some very clever stuff internally," said Leo Borrett, a capability adviser at DSTL. "But we're never going to solve all of MOD's problems if we just look internally."
The challenge is aimed at startups, recent graduates and also those that are working on computer science. With the overall price of £40,000 (£20,000 allocated for the winners), Borrett said that the DSTL has decided to create the challenge based on its need to have technologies and partners that are able to "solve our exploitation of information to inform decision making"..
The first task in challenge is based on classifying documents based on their topics. To do this, DSTL is publishing a dataset of news articles and text documents related to a humanitarian crisis. Participants need to create something that can work and define the themes in the documents.
The second task involves classifying vehicles in satellite images. DSTL provides a series of 100m x 100m satellite images, and the participants need to create an automated system that can identify the types of vehicles, how many they are and classifying them according to their colors.
The project has the potential to identify solutions that will greatly improve the UK's satellite intelligence gathering and analysis capability.
Borrett said that both of the challenges are dedicated to machine learning applications, and he believes that much of the data that has been released should help participants in creating and refining their algorithms. The challenges are also meant to provide insights to military officials, proving them that automated systems for data analysis can be trusted.
This is the first time that the DSTL has run its own data science competition. Previously, it had run an open-source Kaggle challenge which received more than 5,000 submissions.
