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Friday, February 24, 2012

Reasoning-based Artificial Intelligence to aid military decision-making

By Anantha Krishnan M
Express News Service
Bangalore: A critical manifestation of human intelligence is the ability to reason, to be able to decide in the face of choices, the ability to discover patterns. These capabilities have a huge payoff in the military context. Hence, a critical application of artificial intelligence (AI) is in the context of reasoning, which is touched upon in simple terms in this part of the series.
Modern military decision making involves choosing between various emerging choices in the backdrop of a continuous stream of abundant information. This complexity is almost paralyzing to the human being and is also called information overload. Reasoning techniques using AI developed at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) can be a great support, as they can automate many of these tasks.
Another important area is that of military planning. This involves creating a winning strategy in the game of war. “Creating a winning strategy in a far simpler game like chess has been an enigma. Winning strategies for military are far more complex problems. Planning begins to fail, if one needs to strategise under severe time constraints – something that an intelligent and resourceful adversary can create. This is another area that can be supported using AI techniques developed at CAIR,” say sources.
Effective and actionable intelligence creation is both a military and a national need. This has been seen both during Kargil as well as Mumbai. The key problems have been that intelligence is a multi-domain problem, and the information from sensors and agents is usually raw. “This requires humongous human effort to categorize, collate and synthesize information into actionable intelligence – leading to issues of timeliness. The CAIR has established tools that can significantly automate this task,” says sources.
Another aspect of intelligence is to be able to decipher the social network of an adversarial organization. Social network analysis provides insights about the key role players as well as the chains of command. This information has very significant military usage. The scientists have developed solutions that can analyse social networks, and visually represent them for military decision-making.
Finally, robotic intelligence, the dream of science fiction – is the amalgamation of AI and robotics into cyborgs. The CAIR has pioneered this effort in India, and has created intelligent robots that can perform a class of complex tasks autonomously.
Copyright@The New Indian Express
Part 13, tomorrow: Adhoc Sensor Networks

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