Nand Mulchandani, chief technology officer at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), told National Defense in an interview published Monday that JAIC has partnerships with two contracting vehicle organizations and that Congress is working on a bill to provide the center direct acquisition authority.

“They can use Project Tradewinds’ acquisition frameworks to be able to interact with us in a very low overhead way. So we're very excited,” he added.

He cited Project Tradewinds and how the initiative encourages small businesses to work with JAIC and the Department of Defense (DoD). Mulchandani discussed joint warfighting as one of JAIC’s top priorities.

“The [joint warfighting] mission initiative is the broader concept of how do we take AI and help not only improve existing processes or work that we do in joint warfighting, but completely transform the way we go to war,” he noted.

He talked about the potential impact of a continuing resolution on JAIC’s new starts, the center’s relationship with industry and how JAIC has adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has chosen nine universities that will serve as centers of excellence for nuclear stockpile research and development efforts driven by simulation and exascale computing technologies.

The universities will serve as Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP) III Centers and work to drive research into weapons stockpile management in line with NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) initiative, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

“The PSAAP integrates modeling, simulation, and experiment in a manner that contributes to the nuclear security mission and prepares the next generation of scientists and engineers for careers in national security,” said Mark Anderson, assistant deputy administrator for research, development, test and evaluation at the NNSA Office of Defense Programs.

NNSA awarded five-year cooperative agreements to PSAAP III Centers which are divided into Multidisciplinary Simulation Centers (MSC), Single-Discipline Centers (SDC) and  Focused Investigatory Centers (FIC).

MSCs will get a maximum of $16.5 million in funding, while SDCs and FICs will receive up to $9.5 million and $5 million, respectively. Operations under the previous PSAAP initiative began in 2014 and were slated to conclude by the end of fiscal year 2020.

The U.S. Army and Missile Defense Agency (MDA) have concluded testing of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot weapon systems as part of an interoperability exercise that began early this year.

MDA, along with the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command (USASMDC) and Program Executive Office (PEO) Missiles and Space, conducted the THAAD-Patriot test as part of the Flight Test Patriot Weapon System-27 (FTP-27) initiative that builds on a prior assessment in February 2020, U.S. Strategic Command said Thursday.

The FTP-27 assessment took place at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and saw the THAAD Army-Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance and Control Model 2 (AN/TPY-2) radar transmit target data to the Patriot system.

Patriot executed commands from AN/TPY-2 data and intercepted the Black Dagger missile using the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) interceptor.

"The success of FTP-27 validates the interoperability of the Patriot and THAAD weapon systems," said Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of MDA. "This capability is vital to the Ballistic Missile Defense System to defend against rogue threats to our homeland, deployed forces and allies."

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) has partnered with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to select commercial partners that can integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the Department of Defense’s transaction management procedures.

JAIC said Thursday the two DoD entities selected contractors such as Summit2Sea and Vertosoft for the Humanless Unmatched Transactions (HUnT) effort aimed at deploying AI/ML models for identifying errors in accounting procedures and financial transactions.

The HUnT contractors will integrate AI and ML software into the DoD’s current robotic process automation (RPA) systems and the AI/ML models to categorize unmatched transactions. The program's second phase includes training the models to triage transactions. 

“We expect these vendors to supply working prototypes for field trials with the goal of saving the DoD labor hours per year in finding and correcting unmatched transactions,” said Jeff Klugman, director of DIU's AI portfolio.

One company will work with the General Funds Enterprise Business System while another will handle the Defense Agencies Initiative ledger under the DoD comptroller.