The intelligence community has launched a $75,000 prize competition to explore opportunities for artificial intelligence and other machine-based approaches to transform the process by which collected information is examined for credibility and uniqueness.
The Office of the Director of Science and Technology within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—in partnership with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence—is launching its third challenge contest, “Xamine,” to explore AI-based opportunities for verifying collected information. Xamine’s focus on machine-based validation is designed to complement the focus on machine-based product generation and evaluation, respectively, in the jointly-sponsored ODNI-OUSD(I) Xpress Challenge and Xtend Challenge released last year.
“As the volume of information available to the IC’s analytic community continues to exceed the ability for traditional human vetting, the IC will require a scalable means for inspecting and ensuring the integrity of the data that are ingested by IC collection systems,” said Dr. David Isaacson, DS&T program manager for the challenge. “In addition to helping the IC to determine the current state of the art in this area, the Xamine Challenge will help the IC to identify and begin to address the relevant research challenges.”
The Xamine Challenge asks solvers to describe a technical approach for enabling the automated validation of information prior to its incorporation into machine-generated intelligence products. Solvers must provide a well-supported, technology-based justification describing how the proposed solution could — at a minimum — rapidly and objectively determine the reliability of input information with minimal or no human intervention. Further, the solvers should describe their solution in the context of allowing IC analysts to understand and accept the solution and be able to evaluate the solution in terms of its trustworthiness, with minimal additional training.
Challenge solvers’ approaches will be evaluated by a team of IC and Department of Defense scientists, engineers, and other technical experts. The initial prize purse is $25,000, and the deadline for submissions is July 2, 2018. After the close of the challenge, an additional award pool of $50,000 will be available for solvers who are able to provide, upon request from ODNI and OUSD(I), more detailed information such as a pseudo-code implementation of their proposed solution.
To learn more about Xamine, including rules and eligibility requirements, visit the Xamine Challenge competition website or follow @ODNIgov on Twitter (Reference #XamineChallenge) for updates.
