UW to lead $6.25M project creating electronic Sherlock Holmes

The University of Washington will lead a multi-institutional group pushing the limits of computers' ability to interpret data and ultimately predict the behavior of complex systems. The project, involving seven U.S. universities, has received a $6.25 million, 5-year grant from the Department of Defense.

"A complex monitoring system has far too many pieces of information for any one person to look at," said principal investigator Pedro Domingos, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. "This award lets us do the research to develop a system for the military to look at all the available information that might be valuable and use it to predict behavior."

The basic approach is the same as that of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes: using the powers of reasoning to discover the best explanation for a set of clues. But today's reasoning can't be done by a single, pipe-smoking sleuth. The modern military has millions of possible clues, including sensors on soldiers, satellite maps, road monitors, aerial drones and written observations from reconnaissance missions. The Army Research Office that provided the grant wants to make sense of this information in order to make decisions and predict an adversary's next moves.

Although machine learning and artificial intelligence are increasingly used in Web commerce and financial investment, the way those situations are handled today is relatively simple compared to what this project will attempt.

"Existing systems look at one type of sensor data, like text or images," Domingos said. "But in this situation you have to go to a higher level and integrate different types of information. This tool will have to be able to handle high degrees of complexity and uncertainty, and to scale up to a large system."

The new Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant is designed to bring together diverse expertise to confront the challenge. The eventual products, while likely to be useful to the Army, will be publicly available.