DARPA News

DARPA’s new 2025 Young Faculty Award (YFA) solicitation seeks individual principal investigator abstracts and proposals across an array of technical areas representing research and development thrusts from multiple DARPA technical offices.

DARPA’s research has identified the need for fundamentally different approaches to advance AI technology to a place where we’re willing to trust it and not be foolish to do so. Continuing themes from our mini-series on ELSI – ethical, legal, and societal implications of new technologies and capabilities – we meet with DARPA’s ITM program manager, Dr. Patrick Shafto, and the ITM performers and ELSI advisors, who break down how they’re tackling the fundamental question of alignment in the context of human decision-makers and autonomous decision-making tools.

The ability to accurately and rapidly identify key physiological signatures of injury – such as hemorrhage and airway injuries – proved key to success in the DARPA Triage Challenge Event 1. DART took the top spot in the Systems competition, while Coordinated Robotics topped the leaderboard in the Virtual competition and pulled off the win in the Data competition. DARPA-funded and self-funded teams compete side-by-side throughout the DARPA Triage Challenge. Only self-funded teams are eligible for prizes in the challenge events, but they must finish in the top five overall for the Systems competition and top five overall for the Virtual competition. All qualified teams are eligible for prizes in the Final Event. These self-funded teams won between $60,000 – $120,000 each for their first-place finishes.

DARPA announced its new Human-AI Communications for Deontic Reasoning Devops program, or CODORD for short. Deontics, a philosophical term, refers to obligations, permissions, and prohibitions. Devops refers to the combination of software development and IT operations, including development that continues during operations.CODORD seeks to enable communication of deontic knowledge from humans via natural language (e.g., spoken or written English, French, German, etc.) automatically into a highly expressive logical programming language. If successful, CODORD will vastly reduce the cost and time needed to transfer massive amounts of human-generated knowledge about obligations, permissions, and prohibitions into logical languages that an AI can understand and reason rigorously with to provide decision support.

From DARPA’s pioneering work with Other Transactions, to fast-pitch proposals, to the exploration of previously unrealized authorities, hear how the agency is breaking down the barriers of government contracting, providing companies a clearer path to the national security mission.

Building off the success of the program Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE), which recently released its code on GitHub, PWND2 will develop formal models of emergent communication pathways (AKA weird networks) to fundamentally improve the deployment and detection of robust and resilient hidden networks.

DARPA, the Canadian Department of National Defence, and the U.K. Ministry of Defence will collaboratively pursue research, development, test, and evaluation technologies for artificial intelligence (AI), cyber, resilient systems, and information domain-related technologies.

DARPA will host AI BTO Pitch Days on December 5-6, 2024, in the Washington, DC region to select and award AI BTO catalyst projects. To be considered for AI BTO Pitch Day participation, offerors must submit a short white paper consisting of a technical description of the proposer’s idea in response to one of the listed focus areas.

DARPA has selected five top technology accelerators from across the nation as DARPA Commercial Accelerators to facilitate rapid commercialization and scale of DARPA-funded technologies.

Following the July announcement of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), DARPA is hosting a QBI proposers day on Sept. 3, 2024, for quantum computing companies that believe they are on track to develop an industrial-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in the near term.

The Simulating Microbial Systems (SMS) program seeks to create computational simulations that accurately predict the behavior of bacteria in various contexts. Specifically, SMS aims to create comprehensive, generalizable, and interpretable simulations of E. coli by leveraging recent innovations across two broad domains: (1) high-throughput and automated experimental test beds; (2) advanced computational techniques.

The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting two promotional events for bio-innovators, blue sky thinkers, and AI/ML experts to:Get to know BTO program managersDiscover the vision for the officeIntroduce a special funding opportunity connected with an invitation-only event (based on submitted concepts)Share information on new funding opportunitiesConnect with the DARPA community

The Semifinal Competition of the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) – the qualifying round for the two-year competition – culminated at DEF CON 32. AIxCC challenges experts in AI and cybersecurity to defend the software that enables modern life. A DARPA-hosted immersive experience to underscore the real-world stakes of the competition and share competition results drew more than 12,500 visits.

In recent years, a cultural shift toward the programming language Rust and recent breakthroughs in machine learning techniques, like large language models (LLMs), have created an environment that may lend itself to a new class of solutions. DARPA’s Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) program wants to seize this opportunity by substantially automating the translation of the world’s legacy C code to Rust.

DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is hosting an in-person Discover DSO Day (D3) on Oct. 3-4, 2024, in Boston, MassachusettsThe goals of the two-day gathering are to:Highlight DSO science and technology focus areas for future exploration and potential DARPA investment Facilitate conversations between DARPA DSO program managers and members of the broader science and technology ecosystemProvide insights and tips on how to work with DARPA DSO

In this episode, Dr. Jean-Paul Chretien and Elissa Rupley from our Biological Technologies Office provide an exciting update from the recent DARPA Triage Challenge (DTC) workshop at the Guardian Centers in Perry, GA.

Six teams received cash prizes from DARPA’s “Building an Adaptive and Competitive Workforce” competition. The agency awarded $750,000 to kickstart and refine the solutions that showed the most promise in supporting adult learners in developing critical skills necessary for the current and future national security workforce.

The Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing program, known as NGMM, aims to unlock accessible prototyping for the chips of tomorrow with a new agreement to establish the first-ever national center for advancing U.S.-based microelectronics manufacturing.

From August 9-11, in Las Vegas, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in collaboration with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) will hold the AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) Semifinal Competition event at DEF CON 32 – one of the world’s largest cybersecurity conferences – at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The AIxCC Experience will feature programming from AI and cybersecurity experts throughout the event.

DARPA is starting a new effort to examine industrial quantum computing. The Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) will benchmark quantum computing applications and algorithms as well as significantly expand our efforts to validate quantum computer hardware progress. DARPA’s goal is to determine if it’s possible to actually build an industrially useful quantum computer much faster than conventional predictions.