Armed with AI

India this Independence Day

Armed with Artificial Intelligence,
Recognizing the Josh this Independence Day!

By REVOKARMAHUB |15 Aug 2018

It is not every Independence Day that India holds up her head and the world looks on. It is not every Independence Day that the world reckons!

India is giving enough reasons to make heads turn. Right from focused infrastructure changes, cleanliness sweeps, revamped public sector services and most importantly the initiatives in essential services, India has been re-inventing herself step by step. But what takes the cake has to be the most assertive foreign policies in years and the radically newer approaches in strategizing military moves.

Modern day warfare of course comes with a strong support of technology and no technology talk is complete without Artificial Intelligence today. How India pushes herself out of her docile military policies into a completely different front with Artificial Intelligence is a story in the making…..

Artificial Intelligence & Initiatives in the Indian Defense

The setting up of a multi-stakeholder task committee by the Ministry of Defense in India months ago with the singular aim of focusing on the strategic implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the field of defense might have been underplayed, but the formation of a dedicated Defense Artificial Intelligence Council, the DAIC as recently as in February this year marks a new sort of independence for a resurgent Armed Force.

AI- The Force Multiplier

Appropriate guidelines are issued to defense organizations and a vision is laid out with a view of capacity building. The recommendations are implemented by the ministry through fast track conducive policies to provide strategic direction to AI adoption in defense area. The council is focused on chartering partnerships between industry players and the government and reviews recommendations surrounding startups and technology acquisition.

AI has indeed been recognized as a force multiplier by the task force. The emphasis on all defense organizations is now to provide appropriate strategies for effective AI & ML adoption.

Artificial Intelligence – The new member of the Indian Warfare

Interesting military applications of Artificial Intelligence in envisioned in India and enable defense personnel to improve their critical operations, logistics activities and maintenance of important assets.

Intelligent Unmanned Weapon Systems & Drones

India develops unmanned surface, underwater and aerial vehicles, along with cruise missiles & military robotics by effectively leveraging Artificial Intelligence. Such sophisticated weapon systems make use of AI to automatically pursue, distinguish and even destroy enemy targets. These systems comprise of knowledge based systems curated from information collection & processing, efficient decision systems and systems that focus on implementing missions.

Computational Military Reasoning through Tactical AI

Tactical AI emulates human behavior and focuses on battlefield decisions at the spur of the moment. The system analyzes the battlefield situation and acts on available information by setting up coherent orders to set up the most effective courses of action. This exploits the flaws specific to enemy position as determined during battlefield analysis powered by Artificial Intelligence.

  • • Mine sweeping to identify & destroy mines through drones
  • • Combat helmets with augmented vision with predictions
  • • VR based close to battlefield trainings
  • • Combining satellite defense grid systems & AI to combat missiles from the enemy lines
  • • Enemy tanks and warfare detection

Cyber Warfare & Cyber Defense

The offensive effects of cyber operations are now mitigated by India using Artificial Intelligence, by enhancing the defense of critical information systems & military networks. Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks can be effectively detected & circumvented through techniques like statistical analysis, machine learning, pattern match and big data analytics. AI fuzzing techniques and deep neural networks are next-gen technologies that will aid defense systems going ahead.

Cognitive Electronic Warfare

AI is leveraged to improve military communications with dynamic spectrum management. Machine learning applications will play a key role in developing counter measures for enemy systems with the acumen on the lines of humans. AI introduction will give defense area an advantage with the ever increasing complexity of the electromagnetic spectrum.

AI-Empowered Information Processing

The next-gen defense technology in India is visualized as Artificial Intelligence playing a key role in enhancing situational awareness. This is made possible by effective processing techniques to make the most out of sensor data and satellite imaging data provided to deep learning algorithms to predict intelligently.

Combating the Challenges for Implementing AI in India

The Niti Aayog 2018 document titled National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence promoted through #AIforAll, documents the key challenges for AI adoption in India in diverse sectors. There are additional challenges likely to surface for integrating AI into the military sector.

A conservative approach in involving the private sector in defense

The private sector has a major role to play in making Artificial Intelligence efficient as well as accessible through its skill intensive investments. Also the foreign direct investments policy for defense has a restricted approach.

Superficial understanding of the powers of AI for Defense

The policy makers must have concrete understanding of the objectives AI seeks to achieve in a strategic context without the lurking doubts of organizing funds in welfare schemes vs national security.

Lack of critical infrastructure

• Robust, state-of-the-art hardware along with sophisticated data banks are the need of the hour as AI runs complex algorithms on a large amount of data.
• Strategize retaining critical autonomy without risking compromising data stored or communicated through vulnerable infrastructure.

Karma Speaks

India is on a move with new age programmes like Make in India, Skill India and Digital India putting technology on the front foot. With the backing of alma maters of repute like the Indian Institute of Technology and the respected thinkers at the institutes like the ISRO, DAIC and the like, India defies the handicaps of resource limitations and flaunts the most happening technology jargons, Artificial Intelligence & machine learning to strengthen its Armed Forces.

What more can be asked but, “Howz the JOSH”? It has to be “HIGH sir!”