IDEaS Marketplace - Keynote: Rear-Admiral J.B. Zwick
Video - Speeches
Transcript
Our office will help position the Canadian Armed Forces to best meet this future capability requirement.
And programs like IDEaS are a critical piece to meet these future capabilities.
To successfully achieve this objective, innovation plays a key role.
But for us, Innovation is not just about ideas. Innovation is always tied to the ability to perform, execute and deploy.
Furthermore, The Innovation cycle is only complete when a capability is fully fielded and trusted by the user. That user can be the brigade commander, a pilot, the sailor at sea or a forward deployed SOF operator.
I would like to take a few moments to identify three keys areas where we are looking to innovation to play a key role in helping achieve our objectives.
The first area is time.
As I said earlier, in warfare he or she, who makes the best decision the quickest will have the advantage. Or as General MacArthur once famously put it, the synopsis of every military disaster contains the phrase “too late.” Here the integration of multiple diverse data sources, in real time, to provide a single common operating picture is a clear focus area that all militaries around the world are striving to achieve. We are all looking for help in the innovative approaches and systems to help address this challenge.
The second area is legacy equipment.
Every military around the world has the same conundrum of legacy equipment and how to optimize this equipment in an environmental of rapid technological advancement. Like all other militaries, the Canadian Armed Forces has billions of dollars of legacy equipment that it will continue to operate into the future. The challenge is how to best use emerging technologies and modern processing capabilities to unlock the trapped value within these systems. Recent work with our own North Warning System has clearly demonstrated the benefits that can be achieved through this kind of approach.
The third area is the user interface.
As I mentioned earlier one of our challenges is to effectively support a broad range of end users, people, who are operating in a wide range of difficult and dangerous conditions. In this area addressing human factors as we look to enhance human machine pairing is of critical importance. Our work to date with other militaries has shown us that having a user configurable interface, instead of a one size fits all solution, is a key factor to achieving success. Here again, innovation has a key role to play.
IDEaS has been finding and shaping concepts and technology that fit the CAF’s needs for five years now.
We are just now seeing the fruition of hard work, funding and expertise that has culminated in 20 potential candidates for DND/CAF to “Test Drive” their technology.
Test Drives are the final stage in the IDEaS continuum. Which means that they are close to being ready for use.
Currently, there are several test drives in progress or completed.
A Test Drive of a cyber-protection platform has been completed. It was developed by Sapper Labs, and is capable of identifying the perpetrators of sophisticated cyber threats.
A second Test Drive is being conducted with Ecopia, which will use artificial intelligence and mapping technology to detect and classify objects of interest.
And finally, Terra Sense Analytics will be looking at better ways to monitor and interpret Full Motion Video.
The Green Heat test drive is testing a low carbon energy generation system to heat existing DND/CAF buildings.
On top of this, IDEaS will be hosting its third Countering Uncrewed Aerial Systems sandbox in the spring of 2024.
These demonstration events help to refine ongoing technology to detect and defeat drones, as well as bring new technologies forward.
To stay ahead of the curve, we are funding research clusters to find novel defence applications to emerging technologies such as 5G and quantum computing, sensing and communications.
And that’s on top of the research recently completed on advanced materials and autonomous systems, which are being featured today.
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