Developing a Series of AI Challenges for the United States Department of the Air Force

14 Jul 2022 · Vijay Gadepally, Gregory Angelides, Andrei Barbu, Andrew Bowne, Laura J. Brattain, Tamara Broderick, Armando Cabrera, Glenn Carl, Ronisha Carter, Miriam Cha, Emilie Cowen, Jesse Cummings, Bill Freeman, James Glass, Sam Goldberg, Mark Hamilton, Thomas Heldt, Kuan Wei Huang, Phillip Isola, Boris Katz, Jamie Koerner, Yen-Chen Lin, David Mayo, Kyle McAlpin, Taylor Perron, Jean Piou, Hrishikesh M. Rao, Hayley Reynolds, Kaira Samuel, Siddharth Samsi, Morgan Schmidt, Leslie Shing, Olga Simek, Brandon Swenson, Vivienne Sze, Jonathan Taylor, Paul Tylkin, Mark Veillette, Matthew L Weiss, Allan Wollaber, Sophia Yuditskaya, Jeremy Kepner ·

Through a series of federal initiatives and orders, the U.S. Government has been making a concerted effort to ensure American leadership in AI. These broad strategy documents have influenced organizations such as the United States Department of the Air Force (DAF). The DAF-MIT AI Accelerator is an initiative between the DAF and MIT to bridge the gap between AI researchers and DAF mission requirements. Several projects supported by the DAF-MIT AI Accelerator are developing public challenge problems that address numerous Federal AI research priorities. These challenges target priorities by making large, AI-ready datasets publicly available, incentivizing open-source solutions, and creating a demand signal for dual use technologies that can stimulate further research. In this article, we describe these public challenges being developed and how their application contributes to scientific advances.

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