Leonardo opens its AI Factory and recruits young people in the metaverse
The global security systems specialist presents its 'Open' platform: a virtual world designed to attract recent graduates in Stem subjects. Illustrating the many open positions to candidates are avatars of the professional figures
3' min read
3' min read
The European defence industry, at the crossroads between risks and fatal choices, has never had such global challenges before it as it does today. But neither has it had such powerful technological tools to try and meet them. The most powerful of these is the combined use of artificial intelligence and supercomputing.
Leonardo arrives at this appointment prepared, thanks to a transformation process launched in 2019 by current CEO Roberto Cingolani. The main turning point will be in December 2020, with the switch-on of the Davinci-1: a 5 million billion operations per second supercomputer destined to change the face of Italy's most important defence and aerospace company forever.
'Thanks to Cingolani's far-sighted vision,' explained Greta Radaelli, head of Advanced cognitive solutions at Leonardo, speaking yesterday at the Trento Festival of Economics during the panel 'Scaling AI with supercomputing. Leonardo's digital footprint' - today the company has two important assets: an infrastructure for supercomputing and laboratories doing frontier research on digital'.
By the end of the year, Davinci-1 will be upgraded to 20 Petaflops of power. Today, around 2,000 engineers have access to the supercomputer. Combining computing power and proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms, they carry out near-real-time simulations of the fluid dynamics of helicopters and aircraft, study how to analyse the cognitive load of pilots in stressful situations, investigate how to improve radar systems by integrating them with AI, develop advanced systems for military weather forecasting over short periods of time (Nowcasting), or even systems capable of returning a 3D model of an object from a simple photograph.
These assets have become so strategic that they have been brought together in the new Advanced cognitive solutions centre. "It is a sort of Ai Factory, which will bring together Leonardo's digital laboratories dedicated to the themes of artificial intelligence, deep digital technologies and quantum comuputing," explains Radaelli, who has been chosen to head this in-house Ai Factory.
