By David Thornton

Federal News Network

Intelligence community laying foundation for AI data analysis

Artificial intelligence is a concept that seems tailor-made for the intelligence community. The ability to sort through massive amounts of data, seeking out patterns large and small, anomalies that warrant further investigation, that’s what intelligence analysts do already. Imagine what they could achieve when augmented by AI?

But it’s not as simple as just adopting it. Dean Souleles, chief technology advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on Agency in Focus – Intelligence Community that the IC is working now to lay the foundation for adopting AI.

“You cannot build a house without a solid foundation. The foundation of AI is data and computational technology,” Souleles said. “The intelligence community has spent much of the last decade on a program we call ICITE, the information technology enterprise of the IC. And that’s been about modernizing the technology infrastructure. And that is about getting cloud technology throughout the community, making basic computational capability available to our technologists just as it is in the private sector. But that’s not good enough, because the new era of computation requires sophisticated kinds of computing. We talk about GPUs, graphical processing units, or tensor processing units (TPUs), or neuromorphic chips or field programmable gate arrays, or any of the wide variety of things that are the specialized computation that enable AI computation. And we need to make the investments in those things.”

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