Federal Manager's Daily Report

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has launched the latest in a series of contests to explore potential uses of artificial intelligence in government, this one focusing on sorting massive amounts of information and verifying that it is not misinformation.

The “Xamine” contest focuses on use artificial intelligence and other machine-based approaches to “transform the process by which collected information is examined for credibility and uniqueness,” an announcement said.

“As the volume of information available to the IC’s analytic community continues to exceed the ability for traditional human vetting, the IC will require a scalable means for inspecting and ensuring the integrity of the data that are ingested by IC collection systems,” it said. “In addition to helping the IC to determine the current state of the art in this area, the Xamine Challenge will help the IC to identify and begin to address the relevant research challenges.”

The Xamine Challenge asks solvers to describe a technical approach for enabling the automated validation of information prior to its incorporation into machine-generated intelligence products.

“Keeping pace with the accelerating amount of data generated around the world is challenging enough for trained IC analysts using existing practices, but additional problems exist for systems employing AI-based methods. Machine learning techniques, for example, can be undermined by intelligent and adaptive adversaries. Such actors have demonstrated the ability to manipulate input data, thereby exploiting specific vulnerabilities of ML algorithms and compromising the system’s dependability,” it said.