DASA Competition: Scoping out the Grey Zone: Sub-Threshold AI

Funding for innovations to help explore the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) of the sub-threshold Information Environment.

The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is part of the UK Government’s Ministry of Defence. The Accelerator helps public and private innovators develop their ideas into exploitable products and services for defence and security customers, and experiments with novel methodology and innovative approaches to facilitate accelerating delivery of the best solutions.

DASA has launched this competition to support novel and innovative proposals to help explore the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play in improving the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) ability to conduct Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) of the sub-threshold information environment. The sub-threshold encapsulates all activity up to, but not crossing, the legal definition of armed conflict.

This competition is focusing on three challenges. DASA is interested in ideas that can help Defence to apply and use AI to:

• Identify actions in the sub-threshold information environment which are hostile.
• Understand the intent and attribution of those actions.
• Generate courses of action and plausible response options.

The intent is to improve the options for the MOD in developing the technology and understanding to enable processing and exploitation of vast quantities of data at machine speed, improving the ability to:

• Understand actions in the sub-threshold, and identify which are, or appear to be hostile.
• Understand the implications and reach of activities in the sub-threshold.
• Attribute actions to actors.
• Identify likely or plausible intent or consequences.
• Propose plausible response options.

DASA is seeking to fund proposals across a range of maturity levels, from lower TRL ideas for acceleration to the application of AI techniques at TRL6. Additional funding for further phases to increase the TRL may be available. Any future phase would be open to applications from all innovators and not just those who submitted Phase 1 successful bids.