Image Analysis and Understanding Program

The Office of Naval Research, Intelligent and Autonomous Systems program is concerned with the environments in which warfighters operate; which are uncontrolled, complex and dynamically changing. Autonomous agents (cyber or physical) do not yet have the level of intelligence needed to operate in such open, uncertain, and unpredictable environments either independently or alongside warfighters. The main objectives of this program are to develop principles of machine intelligence, efficient computational methods, algorithms and tools for building versatile smart agents that can perform missions autonomously with minimal human supervision, and collaborate seamlessly with teams of warfighters and other agents.
The following are the focus areas of this program: 

Building blocks of machine intelligence: Some of the suggested topics of interest are:

• Methods for building knowledge bases from diverse sources
• Reasoning with uncertain and qualitative information, as well as methods for meta-reasoning for self-assessment
• Planning in large domains in partially known environments and imprecisely modeled goals and assets
• Learning complex concepts and tasks from examples, instructions, etc.
• Intelligent architectures

Autonomy for teams of unmanned vehicles: Some of the suggested topics of interest are:

• Computational methods for building decentralized collaborating teams of vehicles, in particular vehicles that are fairly capable in terms of sensing, communication and computational resources
• Mathematical theories of swarm behavior, particularly engineered swarms with desired behaviors

Human-agent collaboration: Some of the suggested topics of interest are:

• Multi-modal, multi-participant human-agent dialogue systems for seamless interactions that are natural to humans

Note: Proposers are encouraged to contact the program officer to discuss their research interest prior to the submission of formal proposals.