The DAIS ITA Showcases 5 Years of Research Excellence
6 October 2021
Academics, government and industry come together to highlight success of inter-disciplinary research programme.
Showcase events have been held for the Distributed Analytics & Information Sciences International Technology Alliance (DAIS ITA) to inform US and UK military stakeholders of the research programme’s scientific achievements.
The showcase events in the UK and US, which took place on the 9th, 10th and 14th September 2021, provided the DAIS ITA an opportunity to reflect upon the world-leading research that the interdisciplinary US/UK collaboration involving government, academia and industry has produced since 2016. This included research by the DAIS group of the Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI) which garnered much recognition for its contribution to the wider research programme.
Accomplishments of the DAIS ITA programme include enabling of generation-after-next information integration and exploitation, for distributed coalition multi-domain operations in dynamic and contested environments. The field of research has been enhanced by the DAIS ITA through the production of numerous world-leading scientific publications, with 426 associated publications produced since September 2016. Additionally, the programme has published its results at highly selective international conferences, such as the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and within journals, such as Nature.
Other valuable outcomes of the DAIS ITA commended at the showcase event included the programme’s provision of open source code, low technology readiness level (TRL) demonstrators and the quality training of researchers via a successful PhD programme.
Alongside the show case events, the success of the programme was also recognised earlier this year through being awarded the U.S. – UK Science and Technology Stocktake UK Team Award forexcellence in scientific collaboration that has helped foster deep U.S. – UK collaboration between industry and academic partners.
The programme’s research was also commended for being subject to annual independent peer review by a joint US/UK panel of experts. In reference to the programme, the panel said: “Overall, the DAIS-ITA is a challenging, well integrated, and well-managed programme. The programme addresses a wide range of coalition-relevant problems.”
“The Peer Reviewers are mindful that this is not simple: The Programme’s leadership has managed to keep the participants largely focused on militarily – and especially coalition – issues and problems, while keeping the technical level at basic research. This is a rare achievement: to pose (militarily) relevant issues, and thence to encourage the participants – academics, students and industry and laboratory scientists – to abstract these issues to basic research problems with high-value output that is welcomed at selective conferences and in prestigious journals. The Peer Reviewers stress that this, while not quite unique, is extremely rare amongst funded programs.”