By Debbie Gregory.

Congratulations to Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan. General Shanahan will lead its new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or JAIC. He previously oversaw the Pentagon’s controversial artificial intelligence Project Maven. General Shanahan is currently the Director for Defense Intelligence for Warfighter Support. The new JAIC will coordinate artificial intelligence research across the Department, and with government labs and private companies. JAIC, at the end of the day will have a hand in everything the Pentagon does relating to Artificial Intelligence. Maven has been characterized as being the first serious attempt by the Defense Department to cut through bureaucracy and red tape to deliver AI tools quickly to warfighters.

Maven has been described by Pentagon officials as a “pathfinder”, a model for future artificial intelligence efforts. The project uses machine learning to derive useful intelligence from the vast troves of image data that the military collects, freeing up the analysts who manually scoured video footage, spy photos, and other data sources for relevant imagery. The goal was to have algorithms do the boring repetitive stuff — find the right truck, person, object of interest, in the data haystack — then alert the analyst to make decisions about targeting or other next steps.

The Pentagon described it as using “computer-vision algorithms … to help military and civilian analysts encumbered by the sheer volume of full-motion video data that DoD collects every day in support of counterinsurgency and counter terrorism operations.”

Defense officials have said that Maven was a huge success for the Department. But their private-sector partner on the project, Google, saw major public relations fallout from their involvement after their participation was revealed by Gizmodo. Under pressure from employees, Google officials announced they would not be renewing the contract with the Pentagon.