Boston Fusion Awarded DARPA ECOLE Contract
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently awarded Boston Fusion a contract for the Environment-driven Conceptual Learning (ECOLE) program. DARPA created ECOLE in response a requirement by the DOD and intelligence community for “computational systems that can robustly and automatically analyze large amounts of multimedia. These systems must also communicate and cooperate with people to resolve ambiguities and improve performance over time.”
ECOLE will move from today’s machine-learning approach – using (AI) agents that cannot interact with humans through conversation except in limited, specifically designed applications – to a “radical” improvement of technologies by enabling human-machine collaboration and creating AI agents capable of continually learning from linguistic and visual input.
Boston Fusion Corp is among the teams participating in ECOLE. Our project, ARCLIGHT, or Automated Clustering and Curriculum Learning Guided by Human Training, grounds neural systems with symbolic knowledge while expanding and refining that knowledge with dialogue-grounded neural concepts. Using multi-labeled probabilistic transformer models and uncertainty-aware knowledge graphs, we can identify where ARCLIGHT needs human inputs; we then use progression-aware dialogue to help the system improve with minimal burden on the human user (“teacher”).
Boston Fusion’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Jay Miller, said, “we’re excited to be working on this important technology in collaboration with DARPA and our Co-Principal Investigators and world-renowned scholars: Drs. Tomek Strzalkowski, Deborah McGuinness, and Qiang Ji of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.”
