Accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Scale

Accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Scale
May 05, 2022
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The Lockheed Martin Artificial Intelligence (AI) team is excited to announce the first version of Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory, our internal ecosystem for developing and productionizing AI solutions, at scale. AI is a critical capability enabler and strategic focus in Lockheed Martin’s journey to accelerate transformational 21st Century Security solutions for our customers. Essential to the successful implementation of AI across programs and business functions is a common foundational ecosystem that underpins the development and deployment of real-world AI solutions – and our AI Factory is a vital component of this infrastructure.
 


AI Factory streamlines access to computing support, data, software and AI security by eliminating the complexities in the infrastructure (InfraOps) and machine learning operations (MLOps) that can burden teams. By automating components and making them easily accessible through Lockheed Martin devices, AI Factory provides discriminating capability by accelerating development timelines and empowering our AI/ML engineers to focus on what they do best – solving complex challenges and rapidly iterating to build unique domain data models.

Organizations are turning to this game-changing technology across industries. During the recent NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Technology Conference, CEO Jensen Huang noted that, “companies are manufacturing intelligence and operating giant AI factories…MLOps are showing up in companies around the world. Their fundamental mission is to efficiently and reliably transform data into predictive models – into intelligence.”

Lockheed Martin is ushering in a new era of AI with ubiquitous access, unprecedented collaboration and trust-centric adoption.
 

Early Wins

The power of Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory combined with the expertise of our Applied AI researchers was most recently highlighted during the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) Technical Experimentation Event (TE-22) at the Avon Park, Fla. Air Force Range. The Lockheed Martin AI Center (LAIC) Innovations team demonstrated Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (PED), cognitive electronic support and autonomous control capabilities onboard a Lockheed Martin Stalker UAS platform. Frictionless access to computing infrastructure, data and novel algorithmic approaches enabled the team to develop and exhibit innovative AI-based methods in these domains.

Examples of enhanced efficiencies generated by the AI Factory:

  • Automated data pipelines enabled by AI Factory reduced our third-party labeling process from two weeks down to less than a day, providing higher quality and more timely data to our engineers.
  • AI Factory’s tools enabled our teams to build robust, deployable models in a repeatable training environment. This capability is critical to ensuring we can provide customers with explainable, trusted solutions.
  • AI Factory provided a scalable GPU environment for training our algorithms, providing frictionless access to compute resources for our engineers. AI Factory delivers foundational tooling and processing throughout the machine learning lifecycle, enabling our engineers to deliver cutting-edge AI solutions to customers more rapidly.