Kevin Woodward, Space Senior Manager for AI/Machine Learning, said, “Right now our focus has been on the assembly test launch operations, and some of that includes the space environment tests, and we can realize how that spacecraft will function in the environment. Exquisitely, this presents a wonderful, holistic view of the system and an understanding that we have not been able to analyze or view in this way previously. If you were to ask a human to do that same task, it would take them 240 years. Artificial Intelligence does it very quickly within an hour.”

Moto Sato, a researcher at NEC Laboratories America, while speaking about the collaboration, said that NEC is very focused on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can explain its results. “So we are pretty much focused on the experience AI, or we call the white box AI, that helps not only the data scientist but also the expert to understand how the results come from the AI. So we, as an NEC, are not only enhancing the technology from the accuracy or performance point of view to get the trust from the human.”