National Security Workforce gets AI-enabled tools for upskilling

A recent DARPA competition is working to develop tools to help build national security workforce training programs, officials said.

As part of DARPA’s “Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce,” six teams received cash prizes to kickstart and refine solutions showing promise in helping adult learners develop the critical skills necessary for the current and future national security workforce. As part of the U.S. National Defense Strategy, DARPA said the national security workforce need to aggressively fill technology gaps in specialized areas like cyber, data and AI to solve national security challenges.

As a result, DARPA created the competition to provide the agency with the opportunity to provide feedback on a number of proposals while funding technology investments. The agency prioritized solutions in the competition that leveraged generative AI or large language models for teaching STEM subjects to adult populations through digital platforms, and AI tools to improve the user experience and outcomes. Winners were chosen by a wide variety of stakeholders who judged the programs on their potential impact, attention to equity, demand from adults, employers and communities and ability to support rapid experimentation and continuous improvement, among other things.

The winning solutions have demonstrated their ability to enhance the learning process, officials said. Among the winners were Haiku, Inc., for its game-based training simulator for 5G technologies; Eduworks Corporation, for its CrystalSTEM program, an interactive AI tool designed to help continuing education department offer upskilling by analyzing local STEM skill needs and predicting skill trends; and the University of California, Irvine, for Codesafe, an adaptive computer science education platform, using AI and large language models to reinvent existing curricula focused on code comprehension and software security.

“Rapid upskilling will maintain US strategic advantage across a variety of sectors by ensuring a broad and diverse workforce positioned to capitalize on emerging opportunities,” Dr. Wil Corvey, DARPA’s program manager for the competition, said. “From this year’s winners, we expect to seed the educational technology market with innovative products that show the economic promise of applications meeting critical STEM and data science educational needs, promoting further innovation and growth in this market.”