In this episode of Vanguard Radio, Marcello Sukhdeo talks about the delay in Canada’s new defence policy, also he touches on a new military research program that aims to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures and shares a snippet of an interview that he did with Commissioner Hutchinson of the Canadian Coast Guard.
Show Notes:
New defence policy
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the new defence policy which was expected this week would be released on June 7. This will be after the Prime Minister attends a meeting with other NATO leaders in Brussels on May 25.
This week the Defence Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister will hold scheduled talks in Washington with the Trump administration. This move has infuriated many from the opposition including Interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose who said, “I know the chamber has not seen it, members of Parliament have not seen it, and the military has not seen it.”
“Why do Washington insiders get privileged access to Canadian defence policies before the Canadian public does and before the Canadian military does?” she said in question period.
Currently, Canada spends less than one per cent of GDP on defence, which is way below NATO’s target of two per cent. So, it will be interesting to see what the increase will be like when new defence policy is released on June 7th.
AI to model brains
A new military research program in the US aiming to model artificially intelligent systems after the brains of living creatures. The reason – biological systems don’t completely freeze up when they encounter a new situation, but computers often do.
When an organism encounters a new environment or situation, it relies on past experience to help it make a decision. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, relies on data, and if it hasn’t encountered a specific situation before or don’t have the date then it can’t select the next step.
The program named the Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity is searching for technology that constantly updates its decision-making framework to merge experience and new “lessons learned” to situations it encounters instead to what is being done today, that is to retrain the machine learning’s system with new relevant data sets relevant to manage the situation, by erasing the previous programming in favor of the new data. Learn more.
Interview with Commissioner Hutchinson
A snippet of an interview with the Commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, Jeffery Hutchinson on his focus and vision of the Canadian Coast Guard and as compared to that of his predecessor.
Over the next few podcasts, we will share a few more clips from this interview. The full interview will be published in the June/July issue of Vanguard.
Thanks for listening.