AI ‘explainability’ is a ‘major concern’ for National Reconnaissance Office: Director

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is expanding its research and experimentation projects designed to allow analysts to track back how artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms come to conclusions when used to analyze data, according to the spy satellite agency’s outgoing director.

“We must understand how we got to the product,” Chris Scolese told the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s annual GEOINT Symposium in Denver on Wednesday. “AI ‘explainability’ is a major concern for us. It’s still an open area of research.”

NRO is already using and intends to expand use of AI for a number of different mission sets, Scolese explained. First, it is applying AI and machine learning to increase the autonomy of its spy satellite fleet, and to “orchestrate” the fleet as it expands from handfuls of satellites to include a “proliferated” constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) being operated by SpaceX.

Read more at Breaking Defense