Page 18 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

Introduction 5

Chapter 3, titled “Intelligent Autonomous Things on the Battlefield,”
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was written by Alexander Kott and Ethan Stump, both with the U.S. Army
Research Laboratory in Adelphi, MD. Kott is the Chief Scientist in ARL’s
laboratory and Stump is a robotics scientist at ARL. In their chapter they
propose that it is very likely that numerous, artificially intelligent, networked
things will soon populate future battlefields. These autonomous agents and
humans will work together in teams coordinating their activities to enable
better cooperation with human warfighters, but these environments will be
highly adversarial. Exploiting AI, these systems are likely to be faster and
much more efficient than the predecessor systems used in the past
(e.g., McHale, 2018). The authors point out that AI will make the complex-
ity of events increase dramatically. The authors explore the characteristics,
capabilities, and intelligence required for a network of intelligent things and
humans, forming IoBT. IoBT will involve unique challenges not yet suffi-
ciently addressed by the current AI systems, including machine-learning sys-
tems. The authors describe the battlefields of the future as places where a
great diversity of systems will attack each other with physical cyber systems
and electromagnetic weapons. In this complex environment, learning with
be a challenge as will the ever-present need for real-time situational assess-
ments of enemy forces, placing a premium on sensible decision making. This
complexity motivates a series of new needs that the authors discuss, includ-
ing the need for reliable systems under difficult field conditions (e.g., sources
of power in the field); the need to be able to model systems and events ahead
of time in preparation for battle, and in real time as events unfold; the need to
be able to discover emergent behaviors and to control them when they
do occur; and, among others, the need for autonomous systems to be able
to explain themselves to humans. The description of future battlefields by
the authors provides significant motivation to address the problems that need
to be confronted soon and in the future to be able to deploy IoBT for the US
army. The sketch of the problems described by the authors does not, nor can
it, offer complete solutions today. But it is helpful to have this vision of how
sophisticated researchers and users must become to master and to survive in
this new environment.
Chapter 4, titled “Active Inference in Multiagent Systems: Context-
driven Collaboration and Decentralized Purpose-driven Team Adaptation,”
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was written by Georgiy Levchuk, Krishna Pattipati, Daniel Serfaty,

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Corresponding author: alexander.kott1.civ@mail.mil.
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Corresponding author: georgiy@aptima.com.