More than twenty startups were recently awarded Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contracts by the Army during their xTech SBIR pilot competition. The purpose of the pilot is to accelerate technology prototypes for crucial Army capability gaps into military platforms.
The quest to build Artificial Intelligence (AI), at least narrowly defined as computer programs that can mimic human cognitive capabilities sufficiently well as to solve practical problems for us, has again captured the business world’s attention. Government and private investment dollars are flowing into this sector, motivated by Machine Learning (ML) successes in performing object or event recognition and classification from perceptual data, at levels that can match and sometimes surpass the abilities of humans. The availability and affordability of massive amounts of data and computational resources, along with algorithmic innovations including large multi-layer artificial neural networks, has created a kind of gold rush phenomenon in the last ten years.
Join the MIT Industrial Liaison Program in The Leading Edge webinar series, this week on Sustainability on Tuesday, March 9, 11:00AM – 1:00PM EST. This webinar is a broad overview of sustainability research at MIT. Fields include: materials science, energy, recycling, economic policy, and urban planning.