ST. RUI — Since taking over operational control of the Department of Defense’s most prominent artificial intelligence tool in January, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has focused on improving geolocation accuracy, target detection, and automating work processes. “Significant progress has been made,” he said.
Project Maven was created in 2017 to acquire data, images, and full-motion video from unmanned systems and use them to process and detect targets of interest. The agency announced last year that it would oversee the operation of the program, which was managed by the Undersecretary of Defense for Information and Security, but a lengthened fiscal 2023 budget cycle delayed the formal transition until earlier this year.
“The important thing here is that it is under NGA oversight, Maven . General Whitworth said May 22 at the GEOINT conference in St. Louis.
Within the intelligence community, the NGA is leading the processing and analysis of satellite and other bird’s-eye imagery and mapping of the earth. Some parts of Project Maven not related to his GEOINT were transferred to the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Agency. The effort is not yet a formal program, but the agency expects to hit that milestone this fall.
In a meeting with reporters after his speech, Whitworth declined to provide details about how Project Maven is being used, citing security concerns. He said military commanders are “really excited” about the growth of the tool, and that government agencies are expanding cooperation with academia and industry as they continue to develop the system.
NGA’s director of data and innovation, Mark Mansell, said NGA’s primary mission in Project Maven is to improve the quality of AI and machine learning algorithms, and consequently their ability to detect targets in images. I said it was.
He said the NGA used the scenario of the ongoing war in Ukraine to improve the AI algorithms used by Maven and other programs. For example, the agency typically does not train AI models to recognize destroyed equipment. But Mansell said the information has proven valid in Ukraine, and the NGA is currently training models for such scenarios.
Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s Space and Emerging Technologies Reporter. She has covered the US military since her 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She reported on some of the Department of Defense’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.
