ORNL, Vanderbilt partnering with U.S. Air Force Research Lab
Focus is on artificial intelligence-assisted autonomy and decision-making in battlefield applications.
If you have not just awakened from a long nap, you know that artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming one of the most important assets in global competition for almost any sector. That includes AI-assisted autonomy and decision-making in battlefield applications, as attendees learned as Wednesday’s Tennessee Valley Corridor National Summit concluded.
That’s when representatives of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Vanderbilt University, and the U.S. Air Force Research Lab announced a new collaboration drawing on the expertise of the two Tennessee-based research entities and the needs of a modern military.
ORNL’s Moe Khaleel, Associate Laboratory Director for National Security Sciences, and Padma Raghavan, Vice Provost for Research and Innovation at Vanderbilt, joined Ryan Luley of the U.S. Air Force in a discussion about how they will be drawing on their respective strengths. The short session was moderated by Adam DeMella of AMM Strategies and followed a brief introduction by Third District Congressman Chuck Fleischmann.
Under the partnership, the Tennessee-based organizations will build on their complementary research and development capabilities and create science-based AI assurance methods to:
- Ensure AI-enabled systems deployed for national security missions are able to function in the most challenging and contested environments;
- Test and evaluate the resilience and performance of AI tools at large scales in mission-relevant environments; and
- Provide decision-makers with the confidence to rapidly adopt and deploy AI-enabled technologies to maintain U.S. competitive advantage.
Luley distilled the goals into four words: robust, resilient, reliable, and secure. “They are the core of what this partnership is all about,” he said.
Khaleel explained that ORNL’s high-performance computers enable the processing of massive amounts of data. That complements Vanderbilt’s history with developing software integrated solutions, according to Raghavan.
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