Program Summary
Current artificial intelligence (AI) systems excel at tasks defined by rigid rules – such as mastering the board games Go and chess with proficiency surpassing world-class human players. However, AI systems aren’t very good at adapting to constantly changing conditions commonly faced by troops in the real world – from reacting to an adversary’s surprise actions, to fluctuating weather, to operating in unfamiliar terrain. For AI systems to effectively partner with humans across a spectrum of military applications, intelligent machines need to graduate from closed-world problem solving within confined boundaries to open-world challenges characterized by fluid and novel situations.
The Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-world Novelty (SAIL-ON) program intends to research and develop the underlying scientific principles, general engineering techniques, and algorithms needed to create AI systems that act appropriately and effectively in novel situations that occur in open worlds. The program’s goals are to develop scientific principles to quantify and characterize novelty in open-world domains, create AI systems that react to novelty in those domains, and demonstrate and evaluate these systems in a selected DoD domain.