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An Eye—and a Brain—in the Sky

Lockheed Martin recently received a $4.9 million award to develop an object recognition system that employs brain-inspired technologies.  Appropriately dubbed ORBIT (Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology), the system is based on a model of the brain’s neocortex and seeks to mimic human’s extraordinary skill at recognizing patterns and objects.

Although the project is small in nature, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) believes it has great potential and could speed an intelligence analyst’s ability to do his or her job by 100-fold.

For instance, whereas today it is estimated take defense analysts over 1000 hours to sufficiently review a square kilometer—say a small patch of Afghanistan landscape looking for clues of a Taliban hide-out—ORBIT could do the same job in about ten hours.

I would encourage executives to think more broadly about the technology’s applications just simply military intelligence. For example, Google has done an extraordinary job of bringing satellite images to millions of people, but imagine what the company might be able to do when it upgrades Google Earth to allow people and businesses to visually search the world for physical objects.

I also see the manufacturers of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as AeroVironment and Northrop Grumman employing the technology to make their drones even more capable. In wartime, the combination of UAVs and ORBIT could allow the Air Force to rapidly identify and destroy enemy combatants, and in the field of border security the technology might allow border officials to more quickly and accurately identify illegal aliens trying to entry the country.

I am sure there are a host of other applications as well, but this brain-inspired technology should give the Exponential Executive plenty to think about.
In the meantime, I am just looking forward to the day when ORBIT will allow me to find my lost keys using Google.

Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequenter speaker on future trends, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and associations.

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