NITECH ››› OPTIMIZING DEFENCE WITH DATA
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Simon Michell talks to Dr Marcello Piraino, Principal Engineer at NATO Headquarters’ Consultation, Command and Control (C3) Staff (NHQC3S), to find out how applying artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can help improve the quality of the Alliance’s C3 policy documents
IMPROVING NATO POLICIES WITH AI
In his capacity as Principal Engineer at NHQC3S, Marcello Piraino is responsible for C3 policy development oversight, on behalf of the C3 Board, and his mission is to ensure that the policy documents and related implementation directives are coherent and fit for purpose. Until recently, the C3 Board had more than 2,000 policy documents addressing the many nuances of the IT domain, ranging from telecommunications issues to software development and lifecycle management. Not surprisingly, there were instances when a policy on one subject would be contradicted or superseded by a policy on another. Among the
numerous reasons for this was that many of those policy documents were developed at different times, by different subject-matter experts, and in response to different issues. Unfortunately, the lack of sufficient coherency control led to a very low level of policy compliance throughout NATO.
and about 10 implementation directives, with more under review, which provide sufficient coverage of our current needs.” Having achieved this feat, they needed to come up with a plan to ensure this task could be repeated in the future, as more policy documents and implementation directives were developed, or existing ones were amended.
ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGE It was only by implementing a rigorous programme to reduce and align these policies that the C3 Board began to get on top of this challenge. “I was put in charge of a project to rationalize them,” explains Dr Piraino. “This effort took several iterations, but eventually we managed to reduce the 2,000 documents to a few hundred, then a few dozen, and now we have one Alliance C3 Policy document, approved by the North Atlantic Council, containing 12 policy annexes
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING Dr Piraino discussed this requirement with the NCI Agency’s Head of Data Science and Innovation, Dr Michael Street, who suggested that a specialism within AI known as NLP (natural language processing), which leans heavily on machine learning techniques, might be able to help the C3 Board achieve their aim. Luckily, Dr Piraino already had a good knowledge of AI techniques, having completed an AI project as part of his PhD. That
