Reasoning-based Artificial Intelligence to aid military decision-making

By Anantha Krishnan M
Express News Service

Bangalore: A critical manifestation of human intelligence is the ability to reason, to be able to decide in the face of choices, the ability to discover patterns. These capabilities have a huge payoff in the military context. Hence, a critical application of artificial intelligence (AI) is in the context of reasoning, which is touched upon in simple terms in this part of the series.
Modern military decision making involves choosing between various emerging choices in the backdrop of a continuous stream of abundant information. This complexity is almost paralyzing to the human being and is also called information overload. Reasoning techniques using AI developed at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) can be a great support, as they can automate many of these tasks.
Another important area is that of military planning. This involves creating a winning strategy in the game of war. “Creating a winning strategy in a far simpler game like chess has been an enigma. Winning strategies for military are far more complex problems. Planning begins to fail, if one needs to strategise under severe time constraints – something that an intelligent and resourceful adversary can create. This is another area that can be supported using AI techniques developed at CAIR,” say sources.
Effective and actionable intelligence creation is both a military and a national need. This has been seen both during Kargil as well as Mumbai. The key problems have been that intelligence is a multi-domain problem, and the information from sensors and agents is usually raw. “This requires humongous human effort to categorize, collate and synthesize information into actionable intelligence – leading to issues of timeliness. The CAIR has established tools that can significantly automate this task,” says sources.
Another aspect of intelligence is to be able to decipher the social network of an adversarial organization. Social network analysis provides insights about the key role players as well as the chains of command. This information has very significant military usage. The scientists have developed solutions that can analyse social networks, and visually represent them for military decision-making.
Finally, robotic intelligence, the dream of science fiction – is the amalgamation of AI and robotics into cyborgs. The CAIR has pioneered this effort in India, and has created intelligent robots that can perform a class of complex tasks autonomously.

Copyright@The New Indian Express

Part 13, tomorrow: Adhoc Sensor Networks

Inspired by nature, scientists develop artificial neural network models

By Anantha Krishnan M
Express News Service

Bangalore: Want new ideas? Log on to nature! Well, this could be the in-thing Indian defence scientists are wedded to, while exploring the mesmerising possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), the focal point of this  series, is developing AI network models that emulate the computing style of intelligence inherent in nature. “Nature’s creations consist of highly complex systems. The human brain’s Neural Network is an example. The brain is able to perform complex tasks by simultaneous computations, based on sophisticated signalling between neurons. Swarm Intelligence is another example of collective intelligence seen in nature, most commonly in bees and termites,” say sources.
While computer science has progressed considerably, accurately mimicking nature and making them exhibit any significant degree of perception or intelligence, still remains beyond our reach. Increase in computation power has not yet helped in intelligent cognition.  Computational intelligence offers the mechanism of ‘learning’ algorithms that arrive at solutions based on ‘experience’, much like a human does.
“The powerful train-by-example paradigm allows the algorithm to learn based on encountered data, obviating the need for complex classification metrics. In this paradigm, labelled training data is provided to the neural network model, which ‘learns’ to give the correct responses, even for those inputs not previously encountered,” say sources.
Data mining toolbox: A good data mining tool must discover patterns in data. These can then be used to make predictions. However, the biggest problem with military data is that it is unstructured. The state-of-the-art toolbox for doing Pattern Recognition and Knowledge Handling developed at the CAIR is said to be effective for intelligence analysis and decision support in Net Centric Operations.
“It can lend cognitive capabilities to a software defined radio and provide speech and speaker recognition engines. It can autonomously sort the vast amount of information received, impossible for human analysts to collate and analyse. It rejects incorrect or spurious inputs, collates usable inputs and creates inferences under the relevant topic heads,” sources said.
Swarm Intelligence Algorithms are another example of AI mimicking nature. Scientists at the CAIR has developed a site selection algorithm based on the simple, distributed nest construction behaviour of termites with no central control or supervision. “The swarm behaviour has been improvised upon to create a geographical site selection tool used to select suitable sites for any kind of requirement off a digital map, typically military deployments. The algorithm examines a designated area for suitability based on the termite behaviour patterns, using pre-fed logic, and displays selected areas on a geo-spatial information system (GIS) display,” sources said. 

Copyright@The New Indian Express

Part 12, tomorrow: Reasoning,

based on Artificial Intelligence

Software & system sweethearts who captured India's military minds

Women scientists powering India's silent artificial intelligence and robotics sphere during their first-time ever media outing in Bangalore recently. Express Photos: Jithendra M

By Anantha Krishnan M
Express News Service

Bangalore: They march in step with their male counterparts. Their contributions one notch up than men, many times. They make the men who call the shots aware that the times are changing. The ladies have arrived. And, they are here to stay.
Welcome to the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR). Guests onboard this part of the series are all women. Their stellar contributions over the years have scripted many software and system sagas that went on to aid India's defence and intelligence. These software sweethearts come from star cities like Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai, while there are many who represent places like Kadalur, Kasegaon and Kurnool. They have time and again won the heart and soul of the military minds with their smart systems, that make men 'more intelligent.' And, if numbers matter to you on a Sunday morning, they are a healthy 30 per cent of the CAIR's 350-strong research community.
The CAIR stands apart from the rest of DRDO labs in many ways with a modern crèche that facilitates a young mother to swap between the lab and the apple of their eyes. The lab also boasts of a very high number of women scientists who have done their Ph.D, M. Tech and MS at India's best institutes. “Women leaders have an important role to play. They demonstrate an inclusive, team-building style of leadership, problem-solving and decision-making. Their strong people-skills, willingness to see all sides of a situation, coupled with their natural instincts, enables them to empathise better with individual concerns, and incorporate them into the scheme of things when appropriate,,” says DRDO chief V K Saraswat.
The lab's recent acquisition of status as an ISO 9001:2008-certified laboratory owes a great deal to the sheer grit and persuasive qualities of Manimozhi Theodore, Scientist-G, who heads the Software Quality Assurance Group. D Padma, Scientist-F, who heads a team that created Communication Middleware as part of the systems for the Indian Army. Dipti Deodhare, Scientist-F, heads the Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks team, and has established leadership in these esoteric technologies. Their numerous invitations to participate in international scientific forums, publications and collaborations are just glimpses of their hidden prowess.
The next-gen women leaders are groomed to take on the future needs of the armed forces. Persia V and Anshu Bhardwaj, have been in the forefront of cutting-edge R&D, while Chitra Vishwanathan balances her role as the mother of two teenagers admirably with her work. Shyni Thomas keeps a virtual eye on her three-year-old daughter, back in the crèche after a day at the play school, even as she takes on the tough questions of military officers reviewing her work in artificial intelligence, and runs off to face her PhD defence at IISc, balancing it all with practised finesse at multi-tasking. “I have my role models to inspire me,” she said smiling.
Adversities don't seem to stop these women; if at all they seem to motivate them to perform better. "Even under hostile military conditions, in any remote corner of the country, we are more than willing to step up and participate in the fielding of systems that we have helped create," says Smita Srivastava, Scientist-D. "Working on a niche technology like virtual reality is a one-in-a-million opportunity,” feels Sangeeta Shrivastava, Scientist-E, who has contributed to creating a first of its kind terrain fly-through using stereo visualization at the CAIR.

Copyright@The New Indian Express

Tomorrow, Part 8: Battle Management Systems

India develops secure cyberspace intrusion detection systems

A figurative display of integrated cyberspace intrusion detection system.

By Anantha Krishnan M
Express News Service

Bangalore:  Defence preparedness of any nation is widely assessed often in terms of visible assets with little authentic knowledge available in the public domain. While armed forces world over preferred not to speak or let others speak about the Information Technology (IT) strengths, one often read reports of cyber thefts, attacks and loopholes in so-called secure firewalls. While India has been prone to cyber vandalisms in the past, silent IT missions have been running concurrently to aid India’s defence preparedness.
Sources who agreed to part with information on this front to Express said that during conflicts, the side that has superior access to accurate and timely information has a clear edge over its adversary. “Information gathering, processing, and delivering systems and their effective exploitation in the battlefield are vital for prevailing in the end.  Collectively these computerised and networked defence systems make the battlefield digital in nature and entail the need to protect the cyberspace associated with them,” sources with Bangalore-based Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), said.
Given the density and complexity of computerisation in these systems, the corresponding cyberspace acquires a physical reality of its own. Briefly, this cyberspace of the defence systems is the abode of the critical information gathered from the sensors and processed and forwarded to the weapons.
“The twin objectives of the security of this space are to keep its integrity intact and to keep the information housed therein confidential, untampered, and available. Preventive solutions exist for ensuring authentication and access control on the one hand and for encrypting storage and communications of the information concerned on the other. However, these solutions cannot assure complete security especially where human operators are involved and where the defence systems are open in nature requiring interactions with unknown and unpredictable frontiers such as a battlefield,” sources said.
One of the basic methods to check for intrusions is to keep a watch on the integrity values of the committed and free regions of the cyberspace. The committed regions house information and software in the form of files. “Based on a careful sampling of these files, corresponding hashes or checksums may be calculated in clean state and kept as references. Subsequently on a periodic basis, the instantaneous values of the hashes of the select subset of the files may be computed and checked against the references. The unexpected changes, if any, can be an indication of an intrusion,” sources said.
In order to look at aggregate activities of a number of computing hosts and network devices, the technique is to analyse the traffic emanating from or going towards them over gateway-like points. This technique is the basis of many network intrusion detection systems. “There are two generic methods implemented in these systems; one is based on ‘signatures’ of attacks to gain entry into the cyberspaces of target systems, and the other is to identify anomalies in traffic patterns based on statistics or rules,” sources said.
Based on needs, CAIR has developed an IP traffic-based Intrusion Sensing System for Enterprise Networks that can analyze traffic data for possible attacks originating from outside an organization.

Copyrigth@The New Indian Express

Part-3 tomorrow: Robotics for low-intense conflict operations)