Author: Guy Howard

A cyborg soldier controlled entirely by AI. A cybernetically enhanced human roaming the streets doing all kinds of jobs for money. These sound like plots out of a movie or video game. That’s because they are! But don’t let fiction fool you. These developments are coming to the real world sooner than you think.

We’ve all heard of self-driving cars, but how about self-flying planes? Earlier this month, DARPA held a contest called AlphaDogfight (https://www.wired.com/story/dogfight-renews-concerns-ai-lethal-potential/). The goal was to see if an AI could be developed to pilot an F-16 in a dogfight situation better than a human can. Teams from several companies competed and eventually the winner battled a highly trained human Air Force pilot in a simulated dog fight. An AI developed by Heron Systems defeated the other AIs and went on to defeat the human pilot as well. It wasn’t just a lucky shot either. There were five test battles and Heron’s AI shot down the human pilot in all five.

If you attended my Introduction to Machine Learning class, or our March Madness Challenge (which we sadly won’t get to play out), you might have some ideas about how we can use AI to fight COVID-19. At a high level, machine learning is giving the computer many data samples so that it learns to identify something (training) then having the computer look at new data and identify it. My first thought was perhaps we could use lung imaging to diagnose the virus faster. We could train algorithms with CT scans of healthy lungs and scans of COVID-19 infected lungs. The algorithm should quickly be able to learn the differences and identify people with the virus at a high level of accuracy.

IntelliGenesis is collaborating with the University of Buffalo on Rialto, an innovative cyber security project for the Navy. Rialto is a tool that predicts future behavior of Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) based on their past attacks and attacks of similar threats. APTs use a variety of methods to disrupt and destroy cyber operations of their targets.