Outsmarting our enemies

Defence poach best and brightest from universities

AUSTRALIA’S brightest boffins will be drafted to develop new age weaponry such as underwater drones, bombdefusing robots and artificially intelligent battlefield machines.

Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne has signed an agreement to boost the ranks of the Defence Science and Technology Group with interns seconded from universities; acknowledging the potential to put PhD students’ minds and theory toward “real world projects”.

A recent Defence brief raised the critical military need for better autonomous systems technology to combat new regional threats.

These include greater human-machine integration where the machines can be developed to a stage they can dominate a battlefield and act “more autonomously and be sufficiently trusted to make life-death decisions”.

The agreement and program funding was made between Defence and the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute at a maritime security conference in Sydney.

AMSI’s acting national program manager Glen Sheldon yesterday said PhD students, mostly all aged in their 20s, would come from universities across Australia for four to six month paid internships with DST Group, mostly in the maths, artificial intelligence, engineering, computer and automation fields.

He said the students, at least 100 over the next three years, would work on “discreet projects” as part of larger programs. “A lot of the stuff they will do they will run through security clearances and it’s not always public the sorts of things they will be doing,” Mr Sheldon said

“It’s not like they are going out there and designing large scale nuclear weapons or anything ... it’s a multifaceted thing where we try to bridge the gap between research and industry and they work on projects feeding that back into the overall program.”

It is understood these projects include boosting the capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles to go further on less power and communications, counter Improvised Explosive Device robots project and the development of algorithms for better human-machine integration and artificial “swarm intelligence” of collective behaviour by different agents.

Some of their work will involve autonomous systems creation.