Mission Decisions won the DisTec Challenge during IT2EC in London, presented by Caroline Shawl of DSTL and Air Vice Marshal Gary Waterfall RAF (retired).
The competition centred around the theme of AI powered personalised learning and attracted submissions from both industry heavy weights such as BAE Systems and a number of deep tech start ups. Mission Decisions took the top spot with their AI powered Virtual Coach, a proof of concept virtual tutor and a first for UK Defence. Their solution uses the power of Open Source Large Language Models (LLMs), whilst maintaining data security, reliability and transparency.
Mission Decisions demonstrated a working AI application, which used Retrieval Augmented Generation techniques to accurately extract and summarise information from an aircraft technical manual, to support learning and development of students.
The AI application can respond to various prompts, for example providing revision summaries, lesson plans and simpler explanations of highly technical content.
By using secure cloud technology, the Mission Decisions team were able to demonstrate that the original source document had not exposed any data to the internet or leaked sensitive information to a third party, which are some of the key security issues for defence when considering commercially available LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s CoPilot.
