CoVar Awarded DARPA Contract to Define Ethical Standards for Future Autonomous Systems

MCLEAN, Va., Dec. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- CoVar, a leading developer of AI and machine learning solutions for the Department of Defense, has been awarded a multi-year contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to support the Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) program. The goal of the program is to establish a framework that quantitatively measures the ethical readiness of autonomous systems, a crucial step as these systems gain widespread adoption across military and civilian sectors.

DARPA recognizes that as autonomy and AI become increasingly integrated into complex decision-making roles, it is essential to measure and validate the ethical capabilities of these technologies, not just their technical performance. ASIMOV will address this challenge by establishing a shared language for ethical autonomy, enabling the Developmental Testing/Operational Testing community to meaningfully and quantitatively assess the ethical complexity of specific military scenarios and evaluate the capability of autonomous systems to perform ethically within those scenarios. Additionally, the program will incorporate an Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications (ELSI) group to advise participants and provide ongoing guidance throughout the project.

CoVar will be responsible for developing an ethical testing infrastructure for autonomous systems called GEARS or Gauging Ethical Autonomous Reliable Systems. GEARS will define a new mathematics of ethics by representing ethical scenarios and commander's intent with knowledge graphs that are suitable for both human and machine understanding and from which quantifiable ethical challenge ratings of specific scenarios can be derived.

CoVar has formed a multidisciplinary team to address the challenges posed in the ASIMOV program. The team consists of Professors of Ethics, widely published authors in the fields of ethics and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) trust, engineers and ethicists with combatant command experience, and Duality AI, whose digital twin platform, Falcon, empowers autonomous system simulation and comprehensive observable extraction.

"If this work is successful, it will represent the first quantitative ELSI-based evaluation framework suitable for testing ethics of autonomous systems," said Dr. Pete Torrione, CTO of CoVar. "This will empower the US Department of Defense to deploy AI/ML capable autonomous systems with a clear understanding of not only the technical capabilities of the systems, but also the ethics of their behaviors."

By participating in ASIMOV, CoVar will continue to be a leader in developing responsible AI/ML solutions for the Department of Defense and help to shape the future of testing and evaluation for ethical autonomous systems.

For more information on CoVar's work, please visit www.covar.com. For ASIMOV specific inquiries, please contact DARPA Public Affairs, [email protected].

About CoVar

CoVar has over ten years of experience innovating and implementing advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) solutions for defense, industrial, commercial, and medical sectors. CoVar's research team of principal investigators are recognized subject matter experts in the field and lead teams capable of combining big-company reliability and traceability with small company agility and flexibility. The company has developed and delivered state-of-the-art implementations of advanced algorithms in easy-to-use software packages across multiple platforms and stacks. CoVar has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to provide end-to-end solutions that bring game-changing AI/ML technology to implemented software that reliably and effectively improve customer capability.

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SOURCE CoVar