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>https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/31/20746926/sentient-national-reconnaissance-office-spy-satellites-artificial-intelligence-ai
READ THIS ARTICLE. Excerpts below.
https://archive.is/5pZoq
At the final session of the 2019 Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, attendees straggled into a giant ballroom to listen to an Air Force official and a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) executive discuss, as the panel title put it, “Enterprise Disruption.”
Just how good, the person wondered, had the military and intelligence communities’ algorithms gotten at interpreting data and taking action based on that analysis? They pointed out that the commercial satellite industry has software that can tally shipping containers on cargo ships and cars in parking lots soon after their pictures are snapped in space. “When will the Department of Defense have real-time, automated, global order of battle?” they asked.
“That’s a great question,” said Chirag Parikh, director of the NGA’s Office of Sciences and Methodologies. “And there’s a lot of really good classified answers.”
Parkih didn’t mention any particular programs that might help enable this kind of autonomous, real-time interpretation. But an initiative called Sentient has relevant capabilities. A product of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Sentient is (or at least aims to be) an omnivorous analysis tool, capable of devouring data of all sorts, making sense of the past and present, anticipating the future, and pointing satellites toward what it determines will be the most interesting parts of that future. That, ideally, makes things simpler downstream for human analysts at other organizations, like the NGA, with which the satellite-centric NRO partners.
“The NRO has not said much about Sentient publicly because it is a classified program,” says Furgerson in an email, “and NRO rarely appears before Congress in open hearings.”
The agency has been developing this artificial brain for years, but details available to the public remain scarce. “It ingests high volumes of data and processes it,” says Furgerson. “Sentient catalogs normal patterns, detects anomalies, and helps forecast and model adversaries’ potential courses of action.”
“Sentient is a thinking system,” says Furgerson.
Now, nearly six decades after the NRO was founded, the sky is crowded with other downward-looking satellites, some owned by private intelligence companies. One of these, BlackSky, uses those satellites to feed into a system that’s essentially Sentient’s unclassified doppelgänger.
All of that processed, but still disparate, data goes into what BlackSky CTO Scott Herman calls a “giant analytic fusion engine,” which tries to turn it into more than the sum of its parts, tells satellites what to do about it, and alerts human analysts when events meet certain predetermined criteria.
The NRO notes that Sentient doesn’t keep people totally out of the process, providing some kind of check on its state of being. “Having humans in the loop overseeing the intelligence data and information is a key way of monitoring the algorithm’s performance,” says Furgerson. “Sentient is human-aided machine-to-machine learning.”