DIA’s upcoming industry days focus on AI, big data

Defense Intelligence Agency’s Innovation Office announced its third Industry Day series set for Aug 2-3, 2017 at DIA headquarters on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. The event is open to industry and academia, and will focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

DIA’s Industry Days are designed to find new capabilities and business processes from the private sector and academia, and introduce them to DIA’s collaborative Innovation Hub (iHUB) environment to create, test and evaluate potential products.

DIA welcomes vendors and academia to submit white papers in accordance with criteria “NEED 99 – Other Innovative Capabilities” found on DIA’s NeedipeDIA site. DIA uses NeedipeDIA as the mechanism to communicate mission needs to innovators by leveraging an existing Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) that streamlines the acquisition process.

Just a few examples of DIA needs include “Use of AI and Machine Learning Tools to Conduct Collection, Research, Information Monitoring, Automated Reporting, Thematic Data Management, Data Transformation, and Database Development,” “Machine Learning Support to Workflow Automation Activities,” and “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Support to Open Source Information Gathering.”

Interested industry partners should send unclassified white papers to Ideas2Action@dodiis.mil, or classified white papers to Ideas2Action@coe.ic.gov.

“NeedipeDIA is very open to anyone – the mom and pops, the garage innovators out there. If they have something that’s relevant to our organization, we’ll read their white papers, we’ll evaluate them and see where we go from there. Innovation is happening in the private sector, so we want to leverage that to bring them into our agency and see how we can transform what we’re doing in the Defense intelligence enterprise,” said Robert Dixon, special advisor for innovation.

DIA’s last Industry day saw 32 white paper submissions, of which 20 were deemed worth a closer look as a demonstration in the iHUB.

DIA’s iHUB virtually links entrepreneurs to a collaborative environment where they can test and evaluate technology with potential intelligence benefits.

Using NeedipeDIA ensures an even playing field for conversations with industry and academia as needs are refined, possible solutions are investigated, and most importantly, mission practitioners discover what they did not know to ask for.

“It’s not the size of the business that’s important. It’s the idea. We’re casting the net wide, to anyone who has the solutions that can help solve our problems. It could be someone working out of a garage someplace or it could be a large industry partner,” said Dixon.

Source: DIA