Late last month, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) issued a solicitation calling for research proposals that “investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.” Among the focus areas (emphasis added):
Understand: Change is pervasive and accelerating throughout all aspects of human, world and military affairs, bringing with it both opportunities and threats. Examples of threats include emerging regional peer rivals, rogue and failed nation-states, insurgent groups, militant/radicalized populations, transnational terrorist organizations and criminal enterprises, and new classes of cyber-human-physical threats. Military success requires understanding threat capabilities, intentions, and activities as well as local human, social, cultural, and behavioral factors. I2O seeks to enable this understanding through the development of computational and analytic techniques that can process and assimilate the huge volumes of data generated by modern sensor, information, and communication systems, and by incorporating these techniques and new enabling sensor technologies in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) exploitation and language processing systems that can classify behaviors, correlate events, identify trends, detect anomalies, and generate alerts.
Empower: Just as the world has gotten more complex, so have military operations, which require the precise tasking, coordination and control of air, ground and naval forces, ISR assets, weapons systems, communications resources and logistics under highly dynamic, uncertain, and dangerous conditions. I2O works to empower warfighters at all echelons to meet these challenges by developing advanced computing technologies, including modeling and simulation, visualization, knowledge management, geographic information systems, semantic web techniques, social networks, crowd-sourced, and Web 2.0/3.0 techniques, and implementing these in command and control systems that automate and improve the application of information to military decision-making, planning, training, mission rehearsal, and operations support.
Connect: Modern warfighting depends on reliable connectivity for access to theater and national sensor data and to coordinate the action of widely distributed forces. This connectivity is being challenged by increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks on network and computational resources. I2O aims to ensure this connection by developing more resilient computing and communication technologies and by creating new approaches to ensure the security of Defense networks and computing systems. These technologies will enable more rapid detection, analysis, and mitigation of cyber threats; more efficient utilization of network resources; and more effective monitoring and control of computing and communications infrastructure.
The funding opportunity runs through May 30, 2012.
For more details, click here.
(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)
