The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) is holding an enduring challenge competition with £3 million in funding per year to address key defence issues. The competition focuses on 14 challenge areas, including situational awareness, power and energy, cyber defence, data security, and human performance. The challenges involve issues like processing large amounts of data, developing portable secure power sources, and creating synthetic datasets to support training and testing without releasing classified information. The CDE aims to drive innovation in priority technology areas to support UK defense.

1. Centre
Defence
Enterprise
for
24 June 2015
Innovation Network

2. 25 June 2015
CDE enduring
challenge competition
Bruce Hardie - CDE Technology Manager

3. Enduring competition
Perpetual
Radical
£3 million per
year

4. Enduring competition
Challenges
Enduring
Framework

5. Enduring challenge: overview

6. Protection
Defence assets
Portable
Secure – COTS
Disposal /Denial

7. Situational awareness
Geography
Culture
Atmosphere
Social context

8. Situational awareness
Prioritising
Collating
Processing
Human Interaction

9. Power and energy
Key enablers
Mobile power
Alternative
sources

10. Power and energy
Key enablers
Mobile power
Alternative
sources

11. Right person –
Right time
Cost effective
and robust
Secure - COTS
Communication

12. Cyber defence
Pace of change
Legacy systems
Social networks
Data

13. Data security
‘Big data’
Novel solutions
required!
Data

14. Data security
‘Big data’
Novel solutions
required!
Data

15. Storage and
supply
Scalability
Alternatives
Novel defences
Lethality

16. Lethality
Storage and
supply
Scalability
Alternatives
Novel defences

17. Strategic lift
Tactical agility
Fuel efficiency
MOD generic
architectures
Mobility

18. Strategic lift
Tactical agility
Fuel efficiency
MOD generic
architectures
Mobility

19. Support
Physical and
mental
performance
Training methods
Human performance

20. Training - realism
Preparation
Multi-use
equipment
Non-expert usage
Human performance

21. Rehabilitative care
Low risk
Human-machine
‘interfaces’
Human performance

22. Lower cost of ownership
Right person/time
Cost-effective and
robust
Secure - COTS

23. Enduring challenge - linkages

24. How can you get involved?
Right person/time
Cost effective and
robust
Secure - COTS

25. Centre for Defence Enterprise
Advanced Design and
Manufacturing
Wing Commander Jim Pennycook
Centre for Defence Enterprise
030 67704236
cde@dstl.gov.uk
www.gov.uk/dstl/cde

26. CDE enduring challenge competition
[Big] data
Leo Borrett
Capability Advisor – Data Analytics
© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015

27. UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
• 640 TB data transferred every minute via internet
• Cost per Giga-FLOP:
– 2000 - $1,300.00
– 2015 - $0.08
• 90% of world’s data generated in last 2 years
• 1 Zettabyte per year generated by 2015 (to the moon and
back in stacked CD’s)
• ~ 290TB per hour generated by wide area surveillance
sensors
• ~10TB data per Reaper sortie generated
• TB’s to PB’s of unstructured data (text, imagery, video,
audio) generated on operations
Sources:
Wikimedia.com
Staticflikr.com

28. © Crown copyright 2015 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
Who’s driving information technology innovation?
UK OFFICIAL
25 June 2015
Source:
Ycharts.com

29. Enduring challenge themes
1. Big data
2. Machine learning
3. Synthetic datasets
4. Visualisation
5. Human language
6. Predictive analytics
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015

30. Big data
UK OFFICIAL
1. Distributed querying
with poor
connectivity
2. Handling noisy and
missing data
3. Handling privacy and
legal constraints
© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
Sources:
Staticflikr.com

31. Machine learning
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
Human error rate (red line) vs computer – ImageNet
Classification Challenge
1. Open source
frameworks optimised
for defence problems
2. Distributed learning
3. Training on fewer
examples
Sources:
Wikimedia.com

32. Synthetic datasets
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
Dstl struggles to release
classified data to support
external research
Lack of synthetic datasets for
testing, training and
development
Requirement for an ability to
rapidly generate
operationally relevant
synthetic data
Sources:
Wikimedia.com

33. Visualisation
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
1. ‘Big data’ visualisation
2. Representing
uncertainty
3. Novel representation of
complex datasets
Sources:
Wikimedia.com

34. Human language
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
Sources:
Staticflikr.com
1. Machine translation of
poorly structured text
(eg social media)
2. Rapid development of
new language models
3. Speech recognition in
noisy environments

35. Predictive analytics
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015
Strategic requirement
across MOD
INSIGHT to FORESIGHT
Handling false alarms a
key priority
Sources:
Staticflikr.com

36. Questions?
UK OFFICIAL© Crown copyright 2014 Dstl
DSTL/PUB89715
25 June 2015