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You can actually see what DARPA wants to do by looking at their business solicitations. The US government makes a giant wishlist available as a website for busi

You can actually see what DARPA wants to do by looking at their business solicitations. The US government makes a giant wishlist available as a website for businesses to browse and submit proposals for. The last few years, the big ticket item for most organizations is some kind of artificial intelligence that can intelligently process mountains of data. DARPA wants one, too. But they're also into some kinkier stuff.

3131s 10y ago
As one related example, DARPA is interested in "explainable artificial intelligence". Essentially machine learning where the decision making process and intermediary steps are less opaque to humans. http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intellig...
- killjoywashere 10y ago
  What's funny is Google's actually doing a fair bit of this already with the TensorFlow playground, flow-based programming, Distill, etc. DoD will shower money on researchers, but those same researchers will do the work for Google for stock, a decent salary, and access to interesting problems that don't involve killing people.
  - Sunset 10y ago
    But making intelligent killing machines is half the fun of heralding into a Terminator inspired future distopia.
  - Teever 10y ago
    > but those same researchers will do the work for Google for stock, a decent salary, and access to interesting problems that don't involve killing people. Regardless of origin you can rest assured the technology will make its way into the hands of a killer. It always does.
  - nl 10y ago
    That's not what "explainable ML is". That project is about explaining how (say) a given classifier came to a decision on a given set of data. This is fairly easy on a tree-based classifier, but on a deep neural network is extremely difficult. The most impressive piece of work I'm aware of in this area is LIME, from “Why Should I Trust You?” Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier[1] The acknowledgement section of that paper read, in part: This work was supported in part by ONR awards #W911NF-13-1-0246 and #N00014-13-1-0023, and in part by TerraSwarm, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA. Today I saw ELI5[2], which encapsulates LIME and a number of other similar tools. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf [2] http://eli5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ http://eli5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- jstanley 10y ago
  This is a 404 page now.
  - 3131s 10y ago
    Hmm, it still loads for me.
dsfyu404ed 10y ago
I hope you don't think they don't have a wish-list that you can't see because I assure you, they have one. They're not gonna publish an RFP for something that's actually groundbreaking. That's gonna be classified.
- theWatcher37 10y ago
  RFP: quantum algorithms, lots of them ;)
- fapjacks 10y ago
  But that's not what I said, is it?

3131s 10y ago

As one related example, DARPA is interested in "explainable artificial intelligence". Essentially machine learning where the decision making process and intermediary steps are less opaque to humans. http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelligence http://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intellig...

killjoywashere 10y ago
What's funny is Google's actually doing a fair bit of this already with the TensorFlow playground, flow-based programming, Distill, etc. DoD will shower money on researchers, but those same researchers will do the work for Google for stock, a decent salary, and access to interesting problems that don't involve killing people.
- Sunset 10y ago
  But making intelligent killing machines is half the fun of heralding into a Terminator inspired future distopia.
- Teever 10y ago
  > but those same researchers will do the work for Google for stock, a decent salary, and access to interesting problems that don't involve killing people. Regardless of origin you can rest assured the technology will make its way into the hands of a killer. It always does.
- nl 10y ago
  That's not what "explainable ML is". That project is about explaining how (say) a given classifier came to a decision on a given set of data. This is fairly easy on a tree-based classifier, but on a deep neural network is extremely difficult. The most impressive piece of work I'm aware of in this area is LIME, from “Why Should I Trust You?” Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier[1] The acknowledgement section of that paper read, in part: This work was supported in part by ONR awards #W911NF-13-1-0246 and #N00014-13-1-0023, and in part by TerraSwarm, one of six centers of STARnet, a Semiconductor Research Corporation program sponsored by MARCO and DARPA. Today I saw ELI5[2], which encapsulates LIME and a number of other similar tools. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04938.pdf [2] http://eli5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ http://eli5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
jstanley 10y ago
This is a 404 page now.
- 3131s 10y ago
  Hmm, it still loads for me.

dsfyu404ed 10y ago

I hope you don't think they don't have a wish-list that you can't see because I assure you, they have one. They're not gonna publish an RFP for something that's actually groundbreaking. That's gonna be classified.

theWatcher37 10y ago
RFP: quantum algorithms, lots of them ;)
fapjacks 10y ago
But that's not what I said, is it?