Delivering Capabilities for 2020 and Beyond

Happy New Year from the Infrastructure and Platform Division! I hope everyone was able to enjoy the holiday break with family and friends and reenergize for another exciting year.

We finished 2019 with the initial operational capability of the Joint Common Foundation (JCF), which includes development and testing environments. In addition, we have the Intelligent Business Automation, Augmentation, and Analytics (IBA3), Remediation Language Information Classifier (ReLIC), and Cyber “Entropy” applications being tested and further developed in the JCF.

We are also excited for the upcoming availability of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) and JAIC’s designation as a JEDI “early adopter,” which allows us first access to the environment when it becomes available.

This capability will provide an integrated Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) infrastructure with commercially available cloud platform tools to develop AI-enabled capabilities at scale from the enterprise to the tactical edge across multiple classification levels. It is a much-needed capability that will allow the Department of Defense (DoD) to seamlessly deploy AI-enabled capabilities and applications across multiple networks. We are in close coordination with the JEDI program management office to ensure that the needed AI/ML platform and tools will be added to the current offering as soon as possible. This will expand the list of available AI/ML tools for our developers.

There have been many questions about how one can access the JCF. Developers can coordinate their resource needs and account requests through their JAIC Mission Initiative (MI) lead representatives, who will be able to provide the required DD2875 form. Account requests will be processed through MI representatives and our account request team. The JCF can be accessed via a Common Access Card (CAC) or an External Certificate Authority (ECA) certificate on a case by case basis.

Currently, the JCF can provide a common Linux environment with Anaconda and JupyterLab/Notebook platforms, which can be customized with additional applications and tools, such as Docker containers and TensorFlow. The list of tools will expand as we work closely with the DoD/U.S. Air Force Chief Software Officer Software Factory/Centralized Container Source Code Repository to harden open source container tools for the JCF’s Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) process. We look forward to partnering with you in 2020 as the JCF brings AI to the DoD.

COL Sang D. Han
U.S. Army
Chief of Infrastructure and Platform, JCF
Joint Artificial Intelligence Center