Defense – Multimodal Data Fusion and Analytics Group

TeChBioT Surveillance and Reconnaissance Techniques for Chemical & Biological Threats Threats associated with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) hazards include natural disasters, accidental incidents during the installation or transportation of hazardous materials, as well as intentional incidents, such as terrorist attacks or state-sponsored events. Over the past decade, CBRN threats that originate deliberately have persisted or even increased. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is the event that has generated the most attention regarding the social, political, and economic consequences of CBRN crises in general, as well as biological/ health emergencies and civil protection mechanisms. Important gaps and weaknesses remain in rapid detection, identification, and monitoring of low-volatile chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and non-volatile biological warfare agents (BWAs), mainly in complex natural environments. Gas chromatography combined with mass spectrometry (GC-MS) or…

FaRADAI Frugal and Robust AI for Defence Advanced Intelligence An important crosscutting need for Artificial Intelligence is to create technologies for trustworthy autonomous and frugal learning, i.e. the ability of a system to adapt and learn from its environment, including from user supervision, for a reasonable cost and without intervention from expert developers nor regression. Such technologies can be highly disruptive and have high impacts for many capabilities, especially when the information to manage is highly variable or unpredictable and high adaptability is needed. These technologies can also alleviate the current need to provide data to the system developers to get improvements depending on such data, which can be critical when the data is confidential, and is thus critical for defence. They can more generally enhance technological independence. Selected actions…