Dstl took part in a recent 2-day workshop run by the Machine
Speed Command and Control (MSC2) project on artificial
intelligence (AI).
The innovative workshop was run by one of the MSC2 partners,
Cambridge Consultants. It combined multiple industry participants
with the aim of building a common understanding of the
opportunities and challenges of AIacross this wider team.
Much of this shared understanding was explored through practical
exercises, and commercial gaming technologies were used as a
theme. They showcased the project’s novel AI approaches to Command and
Control (C2) via gaming.
Participants built ‘banana classifiers’ as part of the
workshop - a simple AI tool to classify the ripeness of bananas
from photos.
The MSC2
project seeks to show ways to improve and transform C2. It achieves this by aiming to
deliver faster and better C2 activities that can prepare for
and adapt quicker than those of adversaries.
The focus is broadly around the application of AI to C2 as realised in the enabling
context of a Human Agent Collective (HAC). This C2 HAC combines human insight with
machine-speed agents based on shared digital artefacts.
This workshop was set up to not only raise collective
understanding of AI
as applied to the C2
domain, but to also examine commercial games like StarCraft
II.
This is a commercial game which is used extensively
for AI research
by academia and industry. It has a programming interface
available to support AIresearch and there’s also a
strong esports community, which means that large amounts of human
generated data and expertise exists.
StarCraft II made the news in 2019 when Deepmind’s AlphaStar
AI was able to beat
the majority of professional human players; a task significantly
more challenging than previous game AI milestones, such as Chess or
Go.
The MSC2
project is using StarCraft II to investigate the
potential of gaming AI to support military
C2-like problems.
Furthermore, the work around StarCraft II is being projected into
a number of Dstl’s
International Research Collaborations, looking at using
AI to support
C2 in a multinational
context.
Dstl’s
technical authority for MSC2, Dr Stephen
Helsdon said:
“The MSC2
project has been running for about 2 years now. This line of work
has shown that we can relate AI in games like Starcraft II to
military C2-like
problems. These games allow us to investigate adversarial
scenarios based on incomplete and uncertain information.
“Our AI enables the
user to predict the location and type of red forces in real time
based on incomplete data about the battlespace and shines a light
through the fog of war. It empowers the user to understand the
thinking of the AI
by explaining how it produces its predictions and so the trust
between the human and the AI is advanced to a higher
level.
“Going forward, this gaming-centric research will continue with a
focus on better explaining aspects of live human
AI interaction. It
will also look at inferring strategy based on observed
behaviours. The workshop itself generated a number
of interesting technical questions which we will follow up.”
