JACK MAVEN AND THE "MAJOR"....THEN ALONG CAME FLUFFY

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At this point, however, only a few details about how Maven will function and be steered in its next phase beyond that have been widely shared. The project is currently designated as part of “defense critical infrastructure,” which might partly contribute to why officials are tight-lipped. Project Maven showed Shanahan just how hard the data wrangling could get. The aim of Maven was to analyze huge amounts of drone surveillance video that human analysts couldn’t keep up with, training machine-learning algorithms to recognize hints of terrorist activity and report it. The island happened to be marking WWF’s Earth Hour during our stay, and as part of the celebrations we were able to experience a delicious beach barbeque with a wide selection of fish, meat and handmade desserts accompanied by local live music. Something tells me they don’t need much excuse to wheel out the Weber here, though.

While the military data was patchy and dirty, open-source image libraries and other civilian sources were too clean to teach an algorithm how to understand a war zone, Shanahan told me. “If you train against a very clean, gold-standard data set, it will not work in real world conditions,” he said. “It’s much more challenging — smoke, haze, fog, clouds — fill in the blank. And many of JAIC’s projects don’t involve video at all: They range from predicting helicopter engine breakdowns and using natural-language processing to turn troops’ radio calls for air support into unambiguous targeting data.And so, out of the blue comes a phone call from Bob Dylan who wants me to co-produce with him Allen Ginsberg — spoken word with music. And I jumped on it, just so I didn’t have to…and because of that, Patti Smith followed. So now I’m out of that [heavy metal] box.” In every single instance the data is never quite in the quality that you’re looking for,” he says. “If it exists, I have not seen a pristine set of data yet.” Norman Lear, in his latest book, quotes mid-20th century character actor Hans Conried: “I work to work, and the rest follows. When it isn’t about money, it’s funny how much seems to come your way.” Maldivian sunsets are a thing of beauty. It’s difficult to do them justice with words or even images. A personal highlight of the entire trip was the sunset cruise. My wife and I spent the evening on a dhoni (a traditional Maldivian boat) with a personal crew of three, and sailed out into the middle of the ocean to spend the evening watching the sunset, uninterrupted, in all its glory. En route, a family of dolphins appeared in the water beside us and proceeded to perform a series of jumps in the air alongside the boat. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that they had been paid to appear beside us on cue.

This is another reason why Shanahan prefers to think of data as mineral ore rather than petroleum, he told me: “It’s not fungible like oil is.” You can think of full motion video, for example, as palladium: an essential catalyst for some applications, irrelevant for others. And like rare minerals, all the different kinds of data are out there – somewhere – if you can find them, get permission to exploit them from whoever currently owns them, and separate them from the junk that they’re embedded in. Autonomous Ground Reconnaissance & Surveillance: This involves adding Maven-style analysis algorithms to more kinds of scout drones and even ground robots, so the software can call humans’ attention to potential threats and targets without someone having to watch every frame of video. One of the many great places to eat at Huvafen Fushi is a restaurant called Raw, where every ingredient in all meals is – you guessed it – raw. There isn’t an oven in sight, which is no bad thing given that the weather was consistently in the mid-30s during our stay. The signature dish, a raw pizza, uses a hydrated base and was delicious enough to make even a Neapolitan think twice.But the chair shot. It stung more than it hurt. But honestly, I was on top of the world just knowing because after I did the chair shot, I think Taker goes and he throws the camera guy down and they stayed on that shot. Normally they’ll change shot, but they stayed on that on purpose. He had to get the gig out to give me color. And he came over. And he told me great job, kid. And at that point, I just knew my night was all I had to do was sell and then get thrown into a popcorn machine.” Maven was founded with one goal in mind: to breed and cultivate rare and exotic indoor cannabis of the highest caliber. As a company, they are driven by an absolute passion for the flower and dedicated to sparking innovation and craftsmanship in every step of the process. They believe that everyone who seeks more from cannabis is a connoisseur, an enthusiast, and a true maven. Though a little skepticism remains, in the most recent conversation with DefenseScoop, he also explicitly pointed out that he feels “more optimistic than ever” about this point in Maven’s transition, because he has heard that new NGA director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth has made Maven “his priority project.” Even civilian algorithms require continual tweaking, because the world keeps changing. And many military algorithms have to deal with an adversary who’s actively trying to deceive them. The cycle of countermeasure and counter-countermeasures is as old as warfare, but the rise of machine learning has spawned a whole science of adversarial AI to deceive the algorithms.

Even when JAIC is seeking to apply Maven-style video analysis to other kinds of surveillance footage, the algorithms need to be retrained to recognize different targets in different landscapes and weather conditions, all seen from different angles and altitudes through different kinds of cameras. “You can’t just train an algorithm on electro-optical data and expect it to perform in infrared,” Shanahan said. “We tried that.”And that’s about all I can say, because I’m not day-to-day tied in, in terms of classified sources — but I know it’s being used and being used effectively. So, I think they’ve sort of pushed the envelope almost as far as they can go by Maven itself,” Shanahan said. “Now it’s time to get this to the entire Department of Defense and the entire intelligence community.” There are also Maldivian cooking classes on offer, which are educational and fascinating. The demonstrations showcase not only the ingredients and cooking methods of traditional local dishes, but the history behind them too. The marine biology tour also provides information about the conservation efforts that are underway on the reef. Stingrays have been coming to the resort’s ‘stingray beach’ for decades to be hand-fed tuna before embarking on their daily hunting routine. We brought in world-class talent into that CDAO and we’ve paired [its fresh leadership] now with folks like the Maven community that we’ve pulled into CDAO, [who] understand how to connect at a more tactical operational level to the AI-data-level talent,” she explained. “And they’re going to be really focused on creating that integration layer at the software level.”

When asked about taking the steel chair shot from The Undertaker, Maven joked that it wasn’t a butterfly kiss. If that happens in the next couple years, it could lead to “an explosion of ideas that no one knew about because they weren’t being tried out at the so-called tactical and operational” levels, according to Shanahan. From the ocean-view villas (with an ocean view actually built into the floor) to the underwater spa, Huvafen Fushi uses the waters as its inspiration.Data quality is one of the chief pitfalls in applying artificial intelligence to military systems; a computer will never know what it doesn’t know. “There are risks that algorithms trained on historical data might face battlefield conditions that are different than the one it trained on,” says Michael Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. CEO Sundar Pichai also ruled out "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms," or "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights." Operations Center Cognitive Assistant: This project aims to streamline the flow of information through the force. It will start with using natural-language processing to sort through radio chatter, turning troops’ urgent verbal calls for airstrikes and artillery support into target data in seconds instead of minutes. Both men had their theories as to why these narratives resonate so profoundly in the human psyche. For Jung, their characters are archetypes, and the reason they might seem one-dimensional is that they each represent different facets of our personalities. For Freud, fairy tales stemmed from the same place as dreams, and motifs like forests and thorns indicated repressed desires and wish-fulfilment fantasies. Freud being Freud, these are frequently sexual in nature. Eventually Project Maven’s components became more and more sophisticated with additional classes of identifiable objects and capacity to function across imagery from both day and night.