DARPA releases TRIAD AIE

On April 1, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is issuing an Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) Opportunity entitled Tensors for Reprogrammable Intelligent Array Demonstrations (TRIAD), which invites submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in the technical domain of Artificial Intelligence, Modeling, and Simulation. Proposals are due no later than 4:00 p.m. on April 30.

Electromagnetic (EM) phased arrays contain many antenna elements that transmit and receive EM signals. These signals are combined in such a way as to manipulate the spatial directions of the signals, such as to transmit a signal in a specific direction or receive only those signals of interest from a desired direction while ignoring signals emanating from other directions. The fundamental math operation behind phased arrays is a complex multiplication of rows of coefficients, one per beam, by every array element. The beam forming operation is followed by information extraction and processing.

In current digital phased arrays, every element is digitized, leading to an explosion of data requiring billions to trillions of complex operations per second. Currently, racks of high-powered processors are used in many stages of processing to handle the data processing challenge. TRIAD will create a streamlined processing approach to manage the beam forming and information processing directly within the array to significantly cut down on processing time and cost.

TRIAD takes another look at the phased array processing by formulating the coefficient multiplication into a linear algebra tensor operation, which is also the fundamental operation behind statistical machine learning (ML) (e.g., deep learning, including deep neural networks). TRIAD benefits from three advances in tensor processing: tensor algorithm development and execution on specialized processors such as graphics processing units (GPUs), tensor abstractions into common programming frameworks such as PyTorch to speed up application development, and ongoing reduction in the costs of constructing all-digital phased arrays. Combining EM array processing, new computational architectures, and tensor/ML-based programming environments, TRIAD will revolutionize array processing.

Full information is available here.

Source: SAM