Peter Graham
The U.S. Army‘s Rapid Capabilities Office has selected a team from federally funded research and development center operator Aerospace Corp. as the winner of a competition that sought artificial intelligence and machine learning tools that could support electronic warfare missions.
Platypus Aerospace won the $100K first-place award at the Army Signal Classification Challenge while TeamAU — a group of Australian data scientists — came second with a $30K prize and Motorola Solutions‘ THUNDERINGPANDA took in $20K as the third-placer, the Army said Monday.
At least 150 teams from the government, academic and commercial sectors participated in the competition, which focused on identifying technologies that would lessen the cognitive burden on electronic warfare commanders and officers by pinpointing signals of interest in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Rob Monto, director of emerging technologies in the Army RCO, said the office decided to forgo a traditional request for information and held a performance-based, open-to-all competition to determine who could deliver the required technology.
“This challenge targeted the upfront data collection, which is traditionally very labor intensive and time consuming. Now we have a very accurate, very rapid algorithm for a specific problem set,†Monto added.
The challenge kicked off April 30 and concluded Aug. 13.
RCO plans to announce details of the challenge’s second phase later this year.
