2024 Defense One Tech Summit

This one-on-one looks at how the Defense Department’s Critical Technology Office is working to fill the urgent needs of today and tomorrow: hypersonics, quantum & edge computing, next-gen chip design, AI, and more. How is the U.S. competing against China in these fields, and how can we step it up?

Future battlefields will focus on the proliferation of asymmetric threats. Threats that are highly distributed, highly networked, and based on consumer electronics. Epirus is a defense technology company specializing in electronic warfare that can move at the speed of technology to deliver victory in the age of asymmetric warfare.

From sensor to shooter, artificial intelligence has the potential to make soldiers and commanders smarter. But employing the technology across the Army is a challenge. In this panel, our speakers will outline the Army’s ambitious plan to make AI as ubiquitous as ChatGPT, the challenges to scaling, and potential outcomes for operators.

If the U.S. military is going to help Ukraine defeat Russia and deter Chinese adventurism, it will need to rush new asymmetric capabilities, such as hundreds of thousands of cheap, high-performance drones, to the front lines far faster and cheaper than it builds and deploys weapons today. That means overcoming bureaucratic obstacles. This panel discusses ways that the Defense Department is reaching out to non-traditional players and international partners, using new mechanisms and authorities to bring rapid capacity online.

Quantum computing promises a new way to manipulate data, a field that could change our approaches to encryption, cybersecurity, communications, sensing, and and even artificial general intelligence, the next phase of human-like AI. It’s an area in which the United States finds itself in direct competition with China.

Biotechnology, similarly, is on the cusp of a new era of radical progress thanks, in part, to the role of AI in understanding genomic information. But this is also an area where China has invested heavily and by some measures is well ahead.

This panel looks at the information environment around these two critical science areas and reveals how DOD is pursuing breakthroughs that will reshape the future of computing and bio-security.

A one-on-one discussion with Dr. Stefanie Tompkins on DARPA’s world-changing research opportunities in future space startups, never-before-seen airplane designs, the future of artificial intelligence for scientific discovery, edge-computing, 3-D printing new weapons under fire and the research race between the United States and China.