Raytheon of Waltham, MA announced on January 13 that it is developing a machine learning technology under a $6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the Competency Aware Machine Learning program.
Systems will be able
to communicate the abilities they have learned, the conditions under which the
abilities were learned, the strategies they recommend and the situations for
which those strategies can be used.
“The CAML system
turns tools into partners,” said Ilana Heintz, principal investigator
for CAML at Raytheon BBN Technologies. “It will understand the conditions
where it makes decisions and communicate the reasons for those decisions.”
The system will learn
from a video game like process. Instead of giving the system rules, the
researchers will tell the system what choices it has in the game and what the
ultimate goal is. By repeatedly playing the game, the system will learn the
most effective ways to meet the goal.
The system will explain itself by recording the conditions and strategies it used to come up with successful outcomes. “People need to
understand an autonomous system’s skills and limitations to trust it with
critical decisions,” added Heintz.
Once the system has developed these skills, the team will apply it to a simulated search and rescue mission. Users will create the conditions surrounding the mission, while the system will make recommendations and give users information about its competence in those particular conditions. For example, the system might say, “In the rain, at night, I can distinguish between a person and an inanimate object with 90 percent accuracy, and I have done this over 1,000 times.”
Source: Raytheon
By Loren Blinde
January 15, 2020
