EW, Cyber Require Next-Gen Hardware: Conley

The military is investing heavily in artificial intelligence — but AI alone is not enough. You need hardware that can handle your high-powered algorithms, without taking up so much space, weight, and power that it can’t fit into a frontline command post, fighter jet, or tank. And that’s not easy.

There’s “a changing demand signal” from the Defense Department, said Bill Conley, the incoming CTO of electronics maker Mercury Systems. He should know: He just left government after a career that took him from a Navy lab to DARPA to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he was director for electronic warfare.

“Over the last couple of years there’s been a substantial amount of effort dedicated [to] the next generation of artificial intelligence, algorithm training, data,” Conley told me in an interview, “[but] at the tactical edge, not only do you need the algorithms and the data… you also need the hardware it actually runs on.”

Read the full article and more in Breaking Defense.