The Office of Naval Research plans to place greater emphasis on artificial intelligence as a tool to support its work, according to the agency’s new science and technology strategy.
The Navy and Marine Corps Research Division’s investment portfolio is extensive and encompasses innovations at various technology readiness levels, including TRL 1-7. Its focus areas include AI and autonomy. C5ISR and Naval Space. Directed energy and kinetic systems. materials and electronics. Human and biological systems. Manufacture. Naval architecture. Naval Aerospace. ocean, atmosphere, space. power and energy. and submarine systems.
“Strategy, especially for an innovation organization, requires informed bets, and sometimes big ones. Resource allocation is a big part of our job. So ensuring that portfolios are consistently allocated to the highest and best uses (and adjusting as new data emerges) is at the heart of what we must do well to accomplish our mission,” Dr. Rachel Reilly, chief of naval research, wrote in a letter of introduction to the new science and technology strategy released Wednesday.
“At this critical time, we embarked on a journey to hone the way we do every part of our business and to be transparent about what we are solving for, what bets we are making across our portfolio, and how we will measure whether and how they have paid off,” she added.
AI and autonomy are at the top of ONR’s list of focus areas, which includes research in machine learning. Adversarial AI and autonomy. Intelligent and collaborative agents. awareness and understanding. Autonomous system control. We then model, simulate, test, verify and validate according to our S&T strategy.
Now, the organization plans to strengthen the integration of artificial intelligence into real-world workflows through a new “AI-powered research” approach.
“ONR will launch a strategic effort to use AI to conduct basic and applied research, as well as research AI for naval use cases. “ONR will use AI to compress combinatorial search problems, accelerate scientific research, and explore new forms of research acceleration, including AI hypothesis-driven research and other undiscovered methods,” officials said in the strategy.
The initiative comes as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Kao push to deploy AI tools across the department, not only in combat but also in back-office functions.
This technology is expected to serve as an assistant to program personnel.
“ONR will invest in the training and deployment of specialized AI assistant tools to help POs stay current with rapidly changing technology, identify new and non-traditional researchers, integrate researcher work, and automate routine administrative tasks,” officials wrote in the new S&T strategy.
“Additionally, ONR will focus on educating POs on how researchers are increasing the application of AI within their own scientific workflows. By leveraging AI for data-driven portfolio analysis, a single PO can dramatically improve scientific productivity. “The goal is not to replace humans, but to dramatically increase effort by creating a large network of coordinated actors and agents to achieve asymmetric effects in problem solving and time,” the document states.
ONR also envisions using this technology to enhance test validation and quality assurance.
“The speedups that come from AI-generated research are just some of the opportunities and challenges. We will also consider how AI-generated hypotheses, results, and designs are validated through human review, experimental confirmation, or independent AI critique,” the officials wrote.
The independent AI critique “introduces another part of the effort where AI can be used for validation, red teaming, and quality checking of results for AI performers as well as human performers,” it said, adding that ONR would develop “a governance and human oversight framework with defined ethical and security guardrails.”
