JACK MAVEN AND THE "MAJOR"....THEN ALONG CAME FLUFFY

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By the end of its first year in existence, “we had our first models in combat operations,” Shanahan explained. Those initial efforts did not unfold without some publicized controversy, but by the time he retired from the Pentagon in 2020, Shanahan said that the capabilities were being applied in “all the key” Middle Eastern countries where combat was unfolding. To him, the project marked a monumental early AI-driving win for DOD. Technological advancements, higher stakes global competition and many other factors influenced Maven’s origins. But Shanahan said a primary motivator was the need to make sense of the “staggering” amounts of data that were coming off of technology platforms monitoring conflict zones in the Middle East. One of JAIC’s key contributions here will be to build a “common foundation” that pulls together usable data and proven algorithms from across the Defense Department for any DoD user to access and apply to their specific needs. (This will require a DoD-wide cloud computing system, he noted). Then you have the edge cases, something that is so unusual that you just didn’t have enough data to train against it,” Shanahan said. “For example, we may not have had enough camel imagery.” That sounds comical – until the first few hundred times your algorithm glitches because it can’t figure out what this strange lumpy object is that it’s seeing from 10,000 feet overhead.

The stories that are best known today were collected and set down by enthusiasts like the Brothers Grimm, ETA Hoffman and Hans Christian Andersen. In so doing, they codified tales that had always been in flux, passing from teller to teller, acquiring and losing details as in a game of telephone. But once they existed in written form, they became texts that scholars could parse, and for Freud and Jung, they were as productive as the goose that lay the golden eggs. Spokespersons from the CDAO and NGA recently confirmed to DefenseScoop that their organizations are considered “mission partners” in the work. Lines of effort associated with Maven’s GEOINT functions — meaning those that analyze geospatial intelligence, or signals and data of specific locations — will move to NGA by the start of fiscal 2023. Bushcraft Courses, Bushcraft Qualifications, Ancestral Skills, Foraging & Woodland Craft Courses in Kent A tragic victim of our planet’s ever-changing environment, the vast majority of the Maldives will likely be submerged in water by the turn of the next century (the highest point is just a few feet above sea level). We’re one of the last generations to have the opportunity to visit, and there is no finer place on earth to experience unadulterated natural tranquillity.

There’s a kids’ club which provides daily doses of fun for young children as well as an activity centre for teenagers, and for adults there’s a pool-side bar, deli, an internet café and daily morning yoga. There’s also a zumba instructor who really loves his job. A lot. And there are regular ocean excursions where you can swim and seek out turtles, sharks and countless other underwater creatures from the cast of Finding Dory.

Maven was founded with one goal in mind: to breed and cultivate rare and exotic indoor cannabis of the highest caliber. As a company, they are driven by an absolute passion for the flower and dedicated to sparking innovation and craftsmanship in every step of the process. They believe that everyone who seeks more from cannabis is a connoisseur, an enthusiast, and a true maven. Norman Lear, in his latest book, quotes mid-20th century character actor Hans Conried: “I work to work, and the rest follows. When it isn’t about money, it’s funny how much seems to come your way.” And many of JAIC’s projects don’t involve video at all: They range from predicting helicopter engine breakdowns and using natural-language processing to turn troops’ radio calls for air support into unambiguous targeting data. And that’s about all I can say, because I’m not day-to-day tied in, in terms of classified sources — but I know it’s being used and being used effectively. So, I think they’ve sort of pushed the envelope almost as far as they can go by Maven itself,” Shanahan said. “Now it’s time to get this to the entire Department of Defense and the entire intelligence community.”There’s no simple silver bullet solution, Shanahan said. Some suggest rigorously imposing some kind of top-down standard for formatting and handling data, but he argues the Defense Department has too many standards already, and they are inconsistently applied. Sensor To Shooter: This will build on Maven to develop algorithms that can shrink the time to locate potential targets, prioritize them, and present them to a human, who will decide what action to take. In keeping with Pentagon policy, Shanahan assured me, “this is about making humans faster, more efficient, and more effective. Humans are still going to have to make the big decisions about weapons employment.” To push updates to the system, Shanahan’s team similarly had to travel to physically install newer versions at military installations. Today, Maven is getting software updates every month or so—fast for government work, but still not fast enough, he adds.

It’s less a question of standards and more of policies and governance,” he told me. “We now have to think about data as a strategic asset in its own right. Now, a much better approach to drive interoperability is to start with a discussion of metadata standards that are as lightweight as possible, as well as a Modular Open Systems Architecture. Or put another way, we need to agree on the definition of ‘AI Ready’ when it comes to our weapon systems.” Both men had their theories as to why these narratives resonate so profoundly in the human psyche. For Jung, their characters are archetypes, and the reason they might seem one-dimensional is that they each represent different facets of our personalities. For Freud, fairy tales stemmed from the same place as dreams, and motifs like forests and thorns indicated repressed desires and wish-fulfilment fantasies. Freud being Freud, these are frequently sexual in nature. Dynamic & Deliberate Targeting: The idea here is to take targets (for example, ones found by the Sensor To Shooter software) and figure out which aircraft is best positioned to strike it with which weapons along which flight path – much like how Uber matches you with a driver and route. And so, out of the blue comes a phone call from Bob Dylan who wants me to co-produce with him Allen Ginsberg — spoken word with music. And I jumped on it, just so I didn’t have to…and because of that, Patti Smith followed. So now I’m out of that [heavy metal] box.” Facing that kind of firepower, with Sir Richard Burton looking on in support, what’s a working-class kid from the Bronx, who’s been bouncing between playing guitar, petty crime, and interactions with the local cops and judicial system, to do? That’s right. You play your music.

It’s a tremendous task, but one with equally tremendous potential benefits. Working with Chief Data Officer Michael Conlin, “we are trying to fix all sorts of problems with data across the Department of Defense,” not just for AI, Shanahan told me. “I am optimistic.” Even when JAIC is seeking to apply Maven-style video analysis to other kinds of surveillance footage, the algorithms need to be retrained to recognize different targets in different landscapes and weather conditions, all seen from different angles and altitudes through different kinds of cameras. “You can’t just train an algorithm on electro-optical data and expect it to perform in infrared,” Shanahan said. “We tried that.”

Operations Center Cognitive Assistant: This project aims to streamline the flow of information through the force. It will start with using natural-language processing to sort through radio chatter, turning troops’ urgent verbal calls for airstrikes and artillery support into target data in seconds instead of minutes.The marine biology tour also provides information about the conservation efforts that are underway on the reef. Stingrays have been coming to the resort’s ‘stingray beach’ for decades to be hand-fed tuna before embarking on their daily hunting routine. We brought in world-class talent into that CDAO and we’ve paired [its fresh leadership] now with folks like the Maven community that we’ve pulled into CDAO, [who] understand how to connect at a more tactical operational level to the AI-data-level talent,” she explained. “And they’re going to be really focused on creating that integration layer at the software level.”