DARPA asks BAE to Develop Machine Learning-powered Global Awareness Service

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has asked BAE Systems to develop machine learning analytics services as part of its Geospatial Cloud Analytics (GCA) programme.

“BAE Systems aims to develop machine learning analytics as a service – a first-of-its-kind, cloud-based model for the government – that can leverage commercial and open source data to deliver constant worldwide situational awareness for a diverse range of challenges. Research on the GCA program leverages BAE Systems’ machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities such as adaptive reasoning and analysis in its autonomy technology,” the company said Wednesday.

This new technology model seeks to provide an automated service that aims to leverage commercial and open source data, including satellite imagery, to deliver continuous worldwide situational awareness for a diverse range of challenges, including anomaly detection and prediction.

As part of DARPA’s Geospatial Cloud Analytics (GCA) program, the BAE Systems FAST Labs research and development team aims to use the company’s Multi-INT Analytics for Pattern Learning & Exploitation (MAPLE) technology to offer MAPLE as a service (MaaS).

This approach seeks to apply automated analytics to a problem, freeing operators to query the data to answer specific questions about important mission issues at hand while removing the traditional need to conduct extensive manual analysis. For the purposes of this program, the BAE Systems team seeks to apply MaaS to a proposed maritime challenge to automatically and reliably detect vessels that are engaging in illegal fishing.