Raytheon Uses Artificial Intelligence to Help Military Planners

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Raytheon BBN Technologies will explore artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to develop tools that may enable military planners to understand how cultural and other factors combine to cause conflicts.

Raytheon BBN aims to use its machine reading system – a computer system that reads prose and converts it to language understandable by artificial intelligence – to analyze the causal factors behind events and the relationships between them. These factors and relationships will be represented in semantic graphs, providing information in ways that both people and computers can understand. This, in conjunction with other modeling and visualization tools, may provide military planners a clear view of the potential repercussions of various courses of action.

"Using artificial intelligence, we can potentially understand what causes conflict," said David Lintz, vice president, Raytheon BBN Technologies. "When military planners understand the root causes, they may be better able to recommend the best course of action for any given situation."

The work is being done under an award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Causal Exploration of Complex Operational Environments program.

Raytheon BBN Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company.

About Raytheon

Raytheon Company, with 2016 sales of $24 billion and 63,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 95 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5ITM products and services, sensing, effects, and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries.