The following is a letter from Dr. Valarie Browning, the Office Director in the Defense Science Office (DSO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). See the full summer 2018 newsletter here. Earlier this year, on February 7, 2018, DARPA quietly celebrated 60 years of innovation in support of national security. The Defense Sciences Office (DSO), the oldest of the current DARPA Tech Offices, has been identifying and creating scientific discovery to fuel innovation throughout the Agency for much of DARPA’s history. With the upcoming formal DARPA 60th Anniversary Symposium just around the corner, it’s a good time to reflect on where DSO has been and where we are going. […]

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 […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just released a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) on Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) with a June 21, 2017, response date. DARPA is soliciting highly innovative research proposals for the development of fundamentally new machine learning approaches that enable systems to learn continually as they operate and apply previous knowledge to novel situations. Current artificial intelligence (AI) systems only compute with what they have been programmed or trained for in advance; they have no ability to learn from data input during execution time, and cannot adapt on-line to changes they encounter in real environments. The goal of the Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) program is to develop substantially more […]

The following is a press release from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  As the complexity and volume of global digital data grows, so too does the need for more capable and compact means of processing and storing data. To address this challenge, DARPA has announced its Molecular Informatics program, which seeks a new paradigm for data storage, retrieval, and processing. Instead of relying on the binary digital logic of computers based on the Von Neumann architecture, Molecular Informatics aims to investigate and exploit the wide range of structural characteristics and properties of molecules to encode and manipulate data. “Chemistry offers a rich set of properties that we may be […]

The DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) is the first-of-its-kind collaborative machine-learning competition to overcome scarcity in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum. Today, spectrum is managed by dividing it into rigid, exclusively licensed bands. This human-driven process is not adaptive to the dynamics of supply and demand, and thus cannot exploit the full potential capacity of the spectrum. SC2 aims to ensure that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices will have full access to the increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum. Competitors will reimagine spectrum access strategies and develop a new wireless paradigm in which radio networks will autonomously collaborate and reason about how to share the RF spectrum, […]

The National Academies’ Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) is hosting a webinar with Dr. Bradford Tousley, Director of the Tactical Technology Office (TTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on Thursday, October 22nd, from 1-2 PM EDT. The TTO of the DARPA develops system and subsystem level technologies that enable revolutionary improvements to the efficiency and effectiveness of military platforms. Specifically, TTO focuses on Ground Systems, Maritime and Undersea Systems, Air Systems, and Space Systems. As a part of the process, the office is soliciting executive summaries, white papers and proposals for advanced research, development and demonstration of innovative systems for military missions in those focus areas. The webinar will […]