DARPA AI will trawl petabytes of UAV vid for enemy cows

The existence of horses logically implies that there must be other furry four-legged mammals. And horseshit, of course.

Basically, then, the Deep Learning machine, seeing horses, would develop the concept of sheep, goats and cows. In fact it will develop a lot of concepts, according to DARPA:

Before you have a label, you must have a concept to label.The Deep Learning program assumes the ability to learn from unlabelled data in the first phase of the envisioned program.

So the machine will be given access to the multi-petabyte robo-vid surveillance archives of the Pentagon, and start developing unknown concepts on its own using that data as a base. Here are a couple of samples, courtesy of Multi National Forces Iraq HQ:

Perhaps the computer will deduce the existence of hostile two-legged mammals, which must and will be exterminated using smart weapons. Or it may fall back on early programming and start a savage global war against all cloven-footed animals.

Pleasingly, there will be chances to see what the technology does with different data sets - provided we aren't all wiped out at once - as DARPA says it will release all its kit for others to play with.

A further end objective of the Deep Learning program is to support increased growth and development of the broader machine-learning community by making publicly available many, if not all, Deep Learning software modules, algorithmic approaches, evaluation criteria and datasets in several application domains for use by researchers.

There's more from DARPA in pdf here. ®

* Aiee!