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Rise Of Computer Vision Brings Obscure Israeli Intelligence Unit 9900 into Spotlight

(Forbes) Amir Mizroch - It's well known that Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence Unit 8200 - Israel's cyber and code-breaking version of the NSA - produces the cream of the crop of the country's tech startups. But the accelerating shift toward technologies like autonomous driving, natural language processing, satellite navigation, image recognition, and augmented and virtual reality - where machines are taught to make sense of visual information and act appropriately on it - is bringing to the fore another Israeli intelligence unit, called 9900, whose grads are starting to make a name for themselves in Israel's tech ecosystem. Unit 9900 is also very tech-heavy, with graduates gaining knowledge in location-based technologies like GPS, experience in machine vision, photo analysis, and even in Cyber, Augmented Reality, and Virtual Reality. It's official name is Unit 9900: Terrain Analysis, Accurate Mapping, Visual Collection and Interpretation Agency. The Unit is already widely recognized for recruiting soldiers diagnosed on the autism spectrum. The army says these soldiers have remarkable visual and analytic capabilities, and "can detect even the smallest details, undetectable to most people."
2018-05-30 00:00:00
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