Future ISR Architectures

To overcome this, Defence is investing in automation – machine learning and artificial intelligence – to exploit, fuse and analyse this information at machine speeds to achieve real time situational understanding and decision superiority. To realise the benefits of this investment in automation, the underlying information architectures must also evolve to be agile while operating at the same machine driven tempo. The traditional human centric approaches and timeframes associated with the integration of information systems are inadequate and need to be automated.

To address this, DST has initiated research into artificial consciousness of agile and resilient ISR architectures. The vision for the future ISR architecture is one in which sensor and information systems are automatically recognised and integrated, information automatically identified and curated ready for further processing, and one in which the architecture automatically reconfigures to handle dynamic changes within its environment. The broad research areas cover self-awareness, self-integrating and self-healing architectural constructs. The outcomes of the research will be prototyped and fielded in experiments and trials to demonstrate the benefits and validate the impact to future Defence capability.

Partnering OpportunitiesDST is seeking to establish collaborative partnerships with academia to undertake the conceptual architecture research activities in the following areas:

‣ Information architectures & integration patterns

‣ Automation techniques and technologies

‣ Machine learning, artificial intelligence, agent-based techniques & technologies

It is also looking to industry to mature the research outcomes for implementation and demonstration.

Defence is investing heavily in next generation surveillance sensors and systems and is now able to access intelligence from

a variety of sources including the internet, voice, text, imagery, video and social media. The result is an ever increasing

volume and diversity of data and information that overwhelms existing systems and analysts.

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For more information contact:PartnerWithDST@dst.defence.gov.au

For more information contact:

iisr@dst.defence.gov.au

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Today‣ Human-intensive process

‣ Increasing number of ISR collection assets

‣ New sources of data such as social media

‣ Many sources, multiple access methods

‣ Hierarchical and sequential processing and decision-making

‣ Limited machine assistance

‣ Around 85% of collected data is never used

‣ Information provided in non-real time.

Tomorrow‣ Automatic fusion of collected intelligence, military sensing,

social media, text, voice

‣ Use of advanced AI and machine learning for automated exploitation and sense-making

‣ Distributed processing and decision-making

‣ Production of connected, live, data sets

‣ Increasingly integrated ISR and combat cloud

‣ Real-time actionable and explainable information to decision-makers

‣ Answers Why and Who, not just What and When.

Partnering opportunitiesDST is seeking to establish collaborative partnerships with industry and academia to undertake R&D in areas relating to real-time automation, human and artificial intelligence interaction and distributed multi-domain networking.

Key areas of interest include:

‣ ISR automation & integration,

‣ Soft and hard data & information fusion,

‣ Big data analytics,

‣ Computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence

‣ Human and AI interaction

‣ Distributed and resilient multi-domain networking.