The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a Discover DSO Day (D3) on June 15, 2017, to familiarize attendees with DSO’s mission and research areas of interest, promote understanding of how to do business with DSO, and facilitate discussions with potential performers.
The mission of the DSO is to identify and pursue high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives with the objective to prevent and create scientific and technical surprise. DSO Program Managers have started to develop program concepts in the following areas and plan to discuss as many as time permits during D3.
- Complexity Engineering: Understanding the principles of organization and control, the transformation or harnessing of complexity, and the implications of such methods. Topics of interest relate to (1) complex sensing networks to protect city and metropolitan areas from chemical and biological threats and (2) new concepts in war-gaming and conflict simulation.
- Science of Design: The study of processes and methods of design, i.e., ways in which we transform a given state of the world into a better one using tools and technologies. Topics of interest relate to (1) the creation of novel optics with metamaterials; (2) strategies for building cameras that can capture more photonic degrees of freedom; (3) digital representations of engineering information that can anticipate failure, evolve, and merge with other designs; and (4) mathematical optimization and its use in design.
- Noosphere: Create, measure, and model foundational questions regarding humans, human-machine interactions, and society For example, are there new approaches to ‘computation’ based on human or animal social or cognitive processes and how might we understand them? We are also discussing how human perception might be a tool in modern conflict resolution.
- Fundamental Limits: Create, measure, and model foundational questions of nature. We anticipate that example topics will emphasize the study of fundamental limits in natural, physical, mathematical and computational sciences using rigorous and reproducible, hypothesis-driven, scientific methods.
D3 will be held at the DoubleTree Crystal City (300 Army Navy Drive Arlington, VA 22202) and selected sessions will be webcast for those who would like to participate remotely. Advance registration is required for attending the event in person or for viewing the webcast. See the agenda here.
