The Indian Army will soon get help from artificial intelligence to analyse threats during operations, especially in sensitive areas like Jammu and Kashmir. The ministry of defence is planning to equip the army with an AI-based threat assessment software that can be linked to national databases such as UIDAI and MoRTH.
According to an official communication, this software will be used to “track vehicular movement, monitor online presence of individuals, including on social media platforms, and derive linkages and patterns”.
The software will help the army in tracking and predicting incidents and the reason behind acquiring such a software is that operations require a detailed threat assessment. As of now, details of threat assessment are not available with either security forces or law enforcing agencies but only restricted information is available in the form of registers, both at company operating base (COB) levels and with other headquarters.
“Since the data is either non-existent or is recorded in legacy formats (documents and registers), no methods are available with SF for historic correlation of incidents due to which incidents cannot be tracked or predicted,” the official communication states.
The solution: “an AI-based networked solution that will enable storage and analysis of data to track and predict incidents. Details can be linked with national databases such as UIDAI, MoRTH in order to track vehicular movement, as also monitor online presence of individuals including on social media platforms and derive linkages and patterns”.
The software will have the ability to import data available with other agencies. It will enable central collation of details from various patrols with real-time data visibility at all outstations. According to the MoD, this software will be able to integrate legacy unstructured data available in different formats and provide actionable intelligence by combining different databases through the use of AI and data analytics techniques.
The software application is designed to integrate AI and machine learning (ML) aspects with existing known datasets, thereby giving commanders and staff a comprehensive and common picture with regard to operations intelligence, including the capability to carry out data processing in terms of staff checks, query management, use of business intelligence and visualisation to arrive at a course of actions and also assist in ruling out less viable options.
“As the system is being planned keeping in mind the automation requirements of the Indian Army for intelligence generation, the system will be designed for exploitation by AI and ML aspects,” the MoD said. The software will facilitate display and exchange of information over encrypted and secured internet connection and facilitate day-to-day functioning of operations and intelligence gathering and collating at various headquarters, and also facilitate commanders in decision making by incorporating appropriate inputs.
Adequate security measures will be ensured as per the latest guidelines or policies of army cyber group (ACG) system. It will have NLP (natural language processing) models in English, Hindi, Pashto, Arabic, and Urdu to automatically extract intelligence from generated reports, inputs, open source documents and memos.
It will be capable of conducting video and image analytics for raw camera footage from CCTV cameras, social media videos, images among others. The whole idea is to generate actionable intelligence and ability to do dark and deep web monitoring and analysis.
