ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DARPA to Increase
Artificial Intelligence IQ
Researchers wrestle with how to represent
human knowledge in a machine.
Illustration from Shutterstock images.
A
midst a great deal of hype, hope and even
apprehension regarding artificial intelligence
(AI), experts at the U.S. Defense Department’s
premier research and
development organization intend BY GEORGE I.
to help smart machines reach SEFFERS
their full potential.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has been on the frontline of AI scientific
advances for decades. In the 1960s, DARPA researchers
completed some of the foundational work leading to the
creation of so-called expert systems, or the first wave of
AI technologies, according to an agency website. Expert
systems are essentially programmed with much of the
knowledge gleaned from human experts in a particular
field. Expert systems are considered the first wave of AI
technologies.
Since then, DARPA has funded developments in the
second wave of AI, machine learning, which largely
trains computer programs to perform a specific task,
such as detecting certain objects in photographs or
videos. This second wave has significantly impacted
Signal0319.indd 17
Many tasks that are
simple for humans to
learn are much more
complicated for robots.
defense and commercial capabilities in areas such as
speech understanding and self-driving cars.
Today, DARPA is spending roughly $500 million a
year on AI research. It currently has about 80 programs
across the agency with the Defense Sciences Office
and the Information Innovation Office taking the lead.
One of those programs, the Physics of AI, which aims
to embed physics and prior knowledge in AI systems
for the Defense Department, includes 16 individual
projects that involve a wide range of topics, including
unmanned systems, robotics, biomolecular research
and synthetic aperture radar.
The agency’s investment in third wave AI technolo-
gies is designed to ensure the United States maintains
a technological edge and to address the limitations of
first and second wave systems by making it possible for
machines to contextually adapt to changing situations.
The ultimate goal is to improve AI capabilities so that
machines serve as trusted, collaborative partners in
solving problems of importance to national security.
In September, DARPA announced a multiyear invest-
ment of more than $2 billion in new and existing
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 programs called the AI Next campaign. Key research areas
include automating critical Defense Department business
processes, such as security clearance vetting or accrediting
software systems for operational deployment; improving the
robustness and reliability of AI systems; enhancing the secu-
rity and resiliency of machine learning and AI technolo-
gies; reducing power, data and performance inefficiencies;
and pioneering the next generation of AI algorithms and
applications.
“The grand vision of our AI Next campaign is ultimately to
move machines from human tools to human collaborators.
There are a number of challenges in realizing that vision,” says
Valerie Browning, who directs DARPA’s Defense Sciences
Office. She adds that for some applications—image recogni-
tion, natural language processing and voice recognition, for
example—scientists have learned how to represent the neces-
sary knowledge within computer programming.
But for more complex tasks, having AI systems help
with scientific discovery, for example, representing the vast
amounts of necessary data, is much more difficult. “There’s
a whole open space that we need to be able to understand
before we can begin to tap into the potential huge promise
of AI in fundamental [scientific] discovery,” Browning says.
To reach its full potential as a partner to humans, AI
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needs—to put it bluntly—to get smarter. Browning points
out that AI can be easily fooled. “AI can be, either intention-
ally or unintentionally, very easily spoofed into giving incor-
rect answers.”
John Everett, deputy director of DARPA’s Information
Innovation Office, explains that many of the second wave
advances have relied on machine learning techniques, such
as training systems to recognize images, which can be found
by millions on the Internet. “The common thread for all of
AI right now is the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We’ve
done an end run around that because we have so many
images on the Internet. There are limitations because many
important things are not represented in pictures. Chief
among them is common sense.”
He illustrates the point with a fictional vignette featur-
ing a robotic butler, a botler, as he calls it. For that robot
to scramble eggs, it must know how to get to the kitchen,
recognize and open the refrigerator and identify the eggs. As
easy as these tasks may seem to humans, instilling that kind
of knowledge into robots has so far proved challenging.
To scramble those eggs, the robot also needs to understand
the “theory of butter”—that butter is used as a lubricant for
cooking, Everett offers. Using natural language cues, the robot
might understand that Pam is a nonstick spray also used to
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 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

lubricate a pan for cooking, but Everett describes that possibil-
ity as a stretch.
He suggests the robot could place the can of Pam on the
hot burner, resulting in an explosion, burning down the
house and injuring people. “That could be really bad. So
now, we need a theory of thermodynamics, and we need an
on what they know about you,” Everett says. “That would
include past interactions. It would also include knowing
something of the goals and background knowledge of the
person it’s interacting with.”
He illustrates with another vignette about a military
commander in the Arctic planning missions with his sub-

“AI can be, either intentionally or unintentionally,

very easily spoofed into giving incorrect answers.”
—Valerie Browning, director, Defense Sciences Office, DARPA

explanation that I can also use the theory of thermodynam-
ics to explain why popcorn pops, but popcorn popping is
not an explosion.”
The point is that, for machines to scramble eggs, they first
must learn a surprising number of facts, “including that
WD-40 would not be an appropriate lubricant for scram-
bling eggs,” Browning interjects.
Estimates vary, according to the two researchers, but a
21-year-old may know between 1 million and 10 million
facts, meaning people learn up to 606,000 facts per day,
every day. “Somehow, we absorb information about the
world in a way that is so transparent to us that we don’t
recognize this as a major problem until we try to program
computers to do things we take for granted,” Everett says.
“Whatever is really easy for humans tends to be extraordi-
narily difficult for artificial intelligence.”
Everett offers a bit of consolation to any person devas-
tated to learn that systems such as IBM’s Watson routinely
trounce human experts at playing chess. “It turns out that a
computer trained to play chess is really good at playing chess
and nothing else.”
He also cites a case in which researchers at the University
of Washington trained a neural network system to distin-
guish between wolves and huskies. The system was able to
do so quite well, but only by cheating. “They realized every
wolf was standing in snow. So, what they had built was a
really good snow detector.”
Still, machine learning algorithms have made tremen-
dous advances, and the concern among DARPA officials
is that AI may become stuck in a learning rut because so
many systems are trained using bucketloads of labeled
ordinate officers. If an Alexa, or similar system, interrupts
the conversation with the time and temperature, the infor-
mation is irrelevant, easily accessible via other means and
outright annoying. In that case, the system will likely be
switched off.
The researchers envision a time, however, when an AI sys-
tem finds an appropriate moment to break into the conver-
sation, reports that temperatures have been below freezing
for 27 days, notes that a nearby river is frozen over and sug-
gests that river could be used as a road. That system would
more likely become a trusted partner. “Maybe not entirely
like human partners, but we want to start to bridge the gap
so that you can have a meaningful conversation with the sys-
tem,” Everett says. “Now, it’s understood the context. It’s also
understood that people haven’t yet suggested using the river.
And it offers a new solution.”
Asked whether she uses Alexa or a similar technology in
her personal life, Browning explains that she uses it to listen
to music, and her husband and children ask for the tem-
perature before leaving the house. Everett responds, “I don’t
use it. I spent 10 years doing cyber research.”
contact: George I. Seffers, gseffers@afcea.org

RMF for DoD IT

photographs readily available on the Internet. “We may
well be in what we think of as a GPU [graphics processing
unit] trap. In other words, GPUs are so effective at enabling
people to train machine learning systems that a lot of

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