Lloyd J. Austin III Secretary of Defence | Official website
The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OUSD(R&E)) held its second annual Artificial Intelligence (AI) Defense Technical Review (DTR) on July 8 and 9 at the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park. The event, focused on "Scalability and Federation of AI," aimed to review and set a course for intelligent decision-making and strategic coordination across joint and multinational interconnected forces.
The DTR event was open to the public and attracted nearly 300 registrants from government, industry, and academia. Speakers included experts, researchers, and leaders from organizations such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, IBM, and CENTCOM.
Dr. Radha Plumb, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, provided opening remarks on the first day of the conference. This was followed by a fireside chat with Mr. Maynard Holliday, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies, and Dr. Michael Foster, the Chief Data Officer of CENTCOM, discussing practical applications and challenges of federated AI. University President Dr. Darryll Pines also joined to emphasize academic-government collaboration.
Sessions covered an overview of each military service's AI portfolios as well as DARPA's; they addressed mitigating challenges while finding opportunities in federated AI; discussed federated learning; and examined scaling AI responsibly while balancing innovation with ethics.
The conference also included interactive breakout sessions on distributed command-and-control (C2) at the tactical edge, AI orchestration at operational scale, trust in federated AI systems, and the future role of federated AI in defense.
"One significant outcome from this year’s event included the rollout of the AI Passport concept as a new distributed Artificial Intelligence federation framework which enables multi-party software co-development," said Dr. Kim Sablon, Principal Director for Trusted AI and Autonomy at OUSD(R&E). "AI Passport seeks to enable collaboration between diverse toolchains by sharing metadata that comply with the AI Passport Metadata Standards."
Additionally noted was a multi-agent-based C2 on-demand architecture designed to support joint coalition C2 AI capabilities while highlighting continuous loop monitoring needs for updating AI models. The event emphasized designing modularity and security from inception along with hardware-network-software co-design principles.
"DTR provided an opportunity for the community to participate in discussions about future AI integration in defense operations," said Sablon. "These discussions are critical to national security as they inform responsible and ethical use development for defense-related AI."
