Khaberni - A recent contract awarded to an artificial intelligence company shows that the US Navy is enhancing its capabilities in this area to monitor the mines placed by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important navigational passages in the world.
President Donald Trump stated that the US Navy is working to remove the mines from the strait which increasingly threatens to shut down the global economy.
It may take months to remove the underwater mines despite a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran following a war that lasted weeks.
The contract with the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence firm "Domino Data Lab," which is worth close to 100 million dollars, could expedite this process through software that can teach remote-controlled submarines to identify new types of mines within days.
Thomas Robinson, the company’s operations manager, said in an interview with Reuters, "The task of monitoring and removing mines was previously the domain of ships, but now it has become the domain of artificial intelligence."
The Navy pays for the program that enables them to train, manage, and deploy this artificial intelligence at the speed required in waters where conflicts impede global trade and endanger sailors.
Last week, the US Navy awarded a contract worth $99.7 million to Domino to expand its role and become the backbone in terms of artificial intelligence for the accelerated machine learning project for naval operations, a program that makes monitoring underwater mines faster, more precise, and less reliant on human sailors.
The program integrates data from various types of sensors, allowing the Navy to monitor how well different AI detection models perform in the field, identify failures, and make corrections to improve performance.
Speed was the basis of the pitch made by Domino and the Navy's bet.
Updating artificial intelligence models, which operate the Navy's underwater remote-controlled vehicles for monitoring new or invisible mines, used to take up to six months before the company joined, who said it reduced this duration to days.
Robinson clarified the importance of this for the Middle East crisis, saying, "If there are underwater remote vehicles operating in the Baltic Sea trained on Russian mines, it is essential to deploy them in the Strait of Hormuz to monitor Iranian mines, and thanks to Domino's technology, the Navy can be ready within a week instead of a year."
