Accelerator Offers Artificial Intelligence Cookies

By George I. Seffers

Providing Air Force personnel with artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge sparks a desire for more, says Capt. Victor Lopez, an AI researcher helping to advance the technology within the Air Force through a cooperative agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Capt. Lopez works with the Department of the Air Force-MIT AI Accelerator, which is designed to advance AI to improve Department of the Air Force operations while also addressing broader societal needs, according to the accelerator website. The effort focuses on education for military personnel and MIT students, technology research and product delivery for both the Air Force and Space Force.

The captain compares the AI cravings to the children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. The book’s premise is that if you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk, a mirror to check for a milk mustache and on and on. “We’ve found that when you give airmen and guardians AI education, they’re going to want to know how to use it. After you teach them how to use it, they’re going to want to know how to go out and buy it and put it into production, put it into their units,” he says.

So, accelerator personnel “flipped the script” with a concept known as ideation. “It’s a computational thinking system of engineering that combines human-centered design, artificial intelligence education, and contracting and program management education to go from an initial problem or challenge that these airmen and guardians face in their day-to-day jobs all the way to execution and solution,” Capt. Lopez explains.  

Each quarter, the accelerator brings in a new group of airmen and guardians with problems that need solving. They work through self-paced education for a month on AI and human-centered design. They then continue for an additional three months learning from a group of experts who help address their operational challenges. Those experts mostly come from Cyberworx, which is a human-centered design team from the Air Force Academy, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the 10-12 personnel assigned to the accelerator.

Personnel brought into the project in the spring were expected to have working prototypes by September. “They brought everything from how to make better schedules to making robots work better together to improving the debriefing process after a mission,” Capt. Lopez reports. “All of these challenges have a data-centric problem to them and have the potential for machine learning to help their workflow to save time, save people and give the warfighters more flexibility in their operations.”

The accelerator assistance goes beyond prototype development. “We’re going to teach them how to make a pitch, teach them how to write requirements, to put some of these ideas on a contract, to actually go and execute them, whether that is a government solution that we’re able to do internally, a federal lab solution we need to pay a federal lab to do some work on and then the government owns that information, or maybe it’s ready to be spun out into a company.”