AI security

Wanted: AI That Can Spy

Spy satellites and their commercial cousins orbit Earth like a swarm of space paparazzi, capturing tens of terabytes of images every day. The deluge of satellite imagery leaves U.S. intelligence agencies with the world’s biggest case of FOMO—“fear of missing out”—because human analysts can sift through only so many images to spot a new nuclear enrichment facility or missiles being trucked to different locations. That’s why U.S. intelligence officials have sponsored an artificial-intelligence challenge to automatically identify objects of interest in satellite images.

Since July, competitors have trained machine-learning algorithms on one of the world’s largest publicly available data sets of satellite imagery—containing 1 million labeled objects, such as buildings and facilities. The data is provided by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The 10 finalists will see their AI algorithms scored against a hidden data set of satellite imagery when the challenge closes at the end of December.