Defense & Intelligence Policy, Business and Technology

Army uses unconventional challenge process to advance data science for electronic warfare

Federal News Radio: When the Army’s new Rapid Capabilities Office set about one of its first tasks — providing electronic warfare gear to soldiers in Europe — it became clear fairly quickly that artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies offered a lot of promise for helping EW officers identify signals in an environment where the electromagnetic spectrum is jam-packed with transmissions of all sorts.

But even though AI algorithms are already widely used in commercial industry to classify images, doing roughly the same thing with radio signals was more uncharted territory. So instead of issuing a traditional request for information, the RCO decided to use a “challenge” process, giving industry and academia access to a sample of real-world data from Army sensors and seeing who could produce the most accurate results.

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