The NICD is the product of a £30M investment by the UK Government and Newcastle University to create a unique engagement model and innovative new facility to deliver data analytics skills into industry and the public sector.
These skills will be critical to the evolution of the UK’s Defence sector, and Leonardo is investing in a digital transformation across its UK business, covering operations and development of advanced digital and information capabilities that it can provide to the UK and its allies.
The partnership will launch with two data analytics projects, one focused on federated machine learning and another advancing technologies for smart data streaming.
Federated machine learning is a machine learning technique that enables organisations to train AI models using decentralised data, avoiding the need to centralise or share that data. This is important in the defence domain because the underlying data is often security sensitive or subject to intellectual property restrictions. By using federated learning, it will be possible to overcome these existing limits to data sharing, unlocking a range of new applications for Leonardo’s existing and future technologies.
The second project deals with smart data streaming. Here, Leonardo and the NICD will be investigating how to automatically prioritise the most valuable information and insights collected by sensors so they can be shared across wider networks and integrated systems. Smart data streaming uses machine learning to prioritise information so that when the opportunity arises, the most critical information is shared first.
With federated learning and smart data streaming, Leonardo will open up a range of new enhancements for its products and services and new ‘information age’ options for Armed Forces on operations.
Groundwork for the partnership was laid in May with a workshop attended by Leonardo, the NICD, and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)’s Defence Artificial Intelligence Centre (DAIC). DAIC, which Dstl has established to enhance the ability of the UK Ministry of Defence to accelerate the use of AI to achieve strategic outcomes, was invited to feed back and ensure that the Leonardo-NICD partnership has operationally relevant goals.
