Pushing The Boundaries Of Underwater Archaeology. Machine Learning, Deep Water Robotics And Bioinformatic. The Innovation Initiative Of The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

81,000 Americans are still missing-in-action, and about 41,000 of them were lost at sea. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s (DPAA) mission is to search, recover and identify remains of missing personnel from World War II to recent conflicts. DPAA developed a multi-year, multi-objective underwater innovation study aimed at testing and evaluating emerging technologies, techniques and procedures for underwater losses. This unique cooperative project involves the participation of several universities and research institutes across the globe with a combination of cross-disciplinary expertise and skillsets. DPAA and supporting partners worked on the three interrelated innovation tasks implemented in several testbed locations across Europe and the Pacific Region. This paper presents the preliminary results of this study that tested evolving technologies such as machine learning, deep water robotics and in-field bioinformatic. Challenges and limitations, efficacy and opportunities will be discussed along with the applications of these technologies and their potential to fulfill DPAA's mission objectives.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• A Decade of DPAA: Challenges and Opportunities to the Accounting Mission   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow