BAE Systems has been awarded funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to integrate machine-learning (ML) technology into platforms that decipher radio frequency signals.
Its Controllable Hardware Integration for Machine-learning Enabled Real-time Adaptivity (CHIMERA) solution, say the company, provides a reconfigurable hardware platform for ML algorithm developers to make sense of radio frequency (RF) signals in increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum environments.
“The up to $4.7 million contract, dependent on successful completion of milestones, includes hardware delivery along with integration and demonstration support. CHIMERA’s hardware platform will enable algorithm developers to decipher the ever-growing number of RF signals, providing commercial or military users with greater automated situational awareness of their operating environment.
This contract is adjacent to the previously announced award for the development of data-driven ML algorithms under the same DARPA program (Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems, or RFMLS).”
RFMLS requires an adaptable hardware solution with a multitude of control surfaces to enable improved discrimination of signals in the evolving dense spectrum environments of the future.
“CHIMERA brings the flexibility of a software solution to hardware,” said Dave Logan, vice president and general manager of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Systems at BAE Systems.
“Machine-learning is on the verge of revolutionising signals intelligence technology, just as it has in other industries.”
BAE Systems will be responsible for Skynet. The only saving grace is that, true to form, BAE’s T800 will be over budget, behind schedule, full of software bugs and fitted for, but not with, Arnie’s killer one liners!
Not exactly developping AI killing people. This seems to be more about monitoring radio frequencies, hardly skynet.
They don’t mean to, but that’s what they’ll end up doing 🙂 although johnny 5 is more BAES’ style
DARPA is a real example of how defence spending can advance innovation. When I was studying and then after graduation worked in pure AI research back in the late 1970s and 1980s a massive, and I mean massive, amount of the published research was coming from DARPA-funded projects and it wasn’t just AI. The computer industry as a whole owes a lot to DARPA funding.