Like King Louie in the Jungle Book–Artificial Intelligence has to learn like people. Machine learning’s surely a brilliant student, but it’s still a slow learner. Once trained to recognize patterns, analyze huge amount of data, or interpret speech, they can do the job at lightning speed, often better than humans can. But the training part of that equation can be a labor and programming-intensive task, because machines still learn like machines–one thing at a time, often only after repeated instruction. […]

Sometime in May, the Army will take two armed, autonomous Humvees out onto a gunnery range to test and certify them as combat vehicles, which will make them the first robotic ground vehicles to be OK’d for combat. […]

A lot of the Army’s most high-profile modernization projects concern complex, expensive weapons systems that emerge from research and development, budgeting, and procurement process inside the halls of the Pentagon and other facilities and outside of the experience of most people. But some key elements of the Army’s efforts to keep pace with the demands of a changing world are so familiar to people at home, at work, or in a coffee shop that they take them for granted. An example of this is good, reliable Wi-Fi. […]

The Army and Navy recently announced that their Cyber Mission Teams were fully operational, and the U.S. Cyber Command now has all of their planned complement of 133 teams in business. With its people (totaling more than 6,000 service members and civilians) in place, U.S. cyber forces can now look to machines to help carry out effective operations in the cyber domain. […]

MeriTalk compiles a weekly roundup of contracts and other industry activity. Here’s what happened this week in the Federal Information Technology community. […]

As the U.S. military shifts its focus to Europe and Asia, the cyber dominance the Army enjoyed in Afghanistan and Iraq may no longer be assured, according to a recently released Army field manual. […]

James Madison University students are working with the Hacking for Defense (H4D) program, funded by the Department of Defense, in order to build the technologies that the military needs. […]

The market for virtual reality headsets—like the popular gaming system known as Oculus Rift, or the many headsets that are now shipping with consumer drones—is poised for rapid growth starting this holiday season. In fact, Juniper Research estimates that global sales of VR headsets will hit 3 million next year and as much as 30 […]

It takes years to develop, test and field major weapon systems throughout the Defense Department. But when it comes to cyberspace, emerging threats and capabilities are measured in hours, minutes and seconds. The old way of buying defense systems just can’t keep up. The Army, however, is applying a strategy known as the IT Box […]