News reports about artificial intelligence often revolve around the specialized chips needed for compute power, and the sensitivity of potential adversaries gaining access to such integrated circuits. The power of what these chips can do that’s never been done before repeatedly shakes up military and commercial sectors.
Breaking Defense discussed how one company is innovating with Intel chips to create new AI-generated outcomes for DoD, federal, and state entities with Luke Norris, CEO and co-founder of Kamiwaza.
In this conversation we’re going to talk about AI for public-sector mission impact. What does this mean to you, and what is Kamiwaza’s role in this?
Norris: Kawiwaza is an AI orchestration engine and we enable massive dispersed data sets to be rationalized and fused together to achieve mission results. One focus was with the Department of Homeland Security CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) to get an understanding through research done by Sunny Westcott, CISA’s chief meteorologist, at the Naval Postgraduate School about how barometric pressure systems were changing in veracity and what the impact of these barometric pressure systems were to the environment.
That has curtailed a lot of work not just in the state and local area but also curtailed additional work that we’re now starting with the actual naval academy for the Department of Homeland Security on our ability to take this information, take what we call the ‘critical event planning system’, to not only state and local gov but to the DoD.
We are working currently on several projects. We don’t have an Authority to Operate quite yet, but we are getting far along with the Air Force and several other branches in extending not only critical event planning, but also this weather correlation planning system that we’ve built through our AI orchestration engine to help missions across the DoD sectors.
Give us an example of how this works.
One major initiative where we’ve extended critical event planning to an actual outcome is the idea of a smart base, city, or venue. What I mean by that is we can now take all of these correlations of data from 90 years of public and private information and actually help AI build out plans for future events.
Let me take you through a critical event planning scenario. If NOAA comes up with a forecast of a very low barometric pressure event and it’s targeted in a very small region, say a base, an area there’s a training exercise going on, or a large event like an outdoor concert, we can put that into the AI system and it will cross correlate those 90 years of other barometric pressure events that previously happened in that region and it will know all of the impacts of that similar-level event in that area.
Airports that were shut down, routes and highways that were closed, fallen trees and debris, surge in emergency rooms, you name it. The AI system can actually build a reverse canonical plan based off of historics and based off of the future forecast that we are given.
Now you have this massive system that says the last five times an event of this level happened, here was the total impact. Here’s what you should be looking for and here’s how you should proactively plan around that – pre-station troops, pre-station emergency response suppliers, bring in additional resources of X, Y and Z.
That’s a level of overall human expansion and capability that didn’t even exist two years ago. Working with private and public experts, we’re able to build these systems and give them this capability. It’s a game changer and that’s just one niche, which is smart bases, smart cities, smart event planning.
What you’ve described was made possible through your relationship with Intel and its Liftoff for Startups program. Tell us about this partnership.
A core tenet at Kamiwaza says we want it to be what we call ‘silicon neutral’. We wanted to make sure that our customers could run those outcomes on the right silicon that matched their need – not just cost but the thermal load, speed, a large spectrum of considerations. There is no reason one vendor should fit all because each of these vendors have unique capabilities and structures, and when you can match those capabilities and structures to the outcomes that the customers want then it’s a best-of-all solution.
We started with Intel as you said in the Liftoff program to get ourselves situated to figure out how to get our code to work with Intel® Xeon® 6 and Gaudi® 2 and 3 chips because that took some technical uplift at the time. We started to get some interest in our work and I was able to go to Intel’s Industrial Solution Builders enablement group and tell them we have a large opportunity with DHS to test all of this data and if it’s positive it’s going to result in, we believe, a level of applications and services we’ll be able to take to the state and fed. They were then able to secure us a couple Gaudi 3 servers in Intel’s cyber cloud and also get us a technical team to make sure we’re maximizing the capabilities of the Gaudi 3 chips and cyber cloud.
From the support we got and the actual production use cases we were able to produce, DHS came to us and wanted us to start doing this incredible amount of data processing and number crunching that was going to run on very large systems. Sunny Westcott, however, said that she was concerned about the overall water usage and thermal load of running such a large AI system.
We were able to point her to the efficient Gaudi 3 system and all of the core benchmarks showing overall wattage usage and the impact on the environment. That made her and the whole group there feel comfortable that they were working on the most efficient systems, and we were able to take care of that concern while accessing the immense processing power of the Gaudi 3 chips to do this extreme, large data processing and cross correlations.
How does this Kamiwaza/Intel partnership help to secure the US industrial base?
When we’re working with the federal government, they have large concerns because these AI systems are going to have so much command and control of the environments that they’re plugged into. How is there an assurance within the supply chain? How can they also know that the next version is also going to be secure and can be upgraded and replaced.
They want to know that this is going to be American made, American secure, and that there’s an American upgrade path as this continues to have importance in the environment. That is something we’ve doubled down on even with our partnership with Intel. It removes almost all considerations right out of the gate. If they do have continued concerns, we’re able to give them the documentation and get them in touch with Intel to prove the supply chain, to prove the American innovation.
It’s a great story all around because when you can actually bring, once again, the power of these Gaudi 3 chips and show their effectiveness and efficiency, and demonstrate the outcomes they’re able to deliver, it’s a solid win across the board.
To learn more about Intel and AI visit www.intel.com/usai
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Author: Breaking Defense
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