DARPA News

Available and reliable tactical data and communications networks are critical in modern warfare – especially as adversaries seek to disrupt the flow of information across space, air, maritime, ground, and cyber nodes. Current military networks, however, are manually and statically configured, stove piped, prone to error, and don’t scale easily.

Sentiment analysis – the process of identifying positive, negative, or neutral emotion – across online communications has become a growing focus for both commercial and defense communities. Understanding the sentiment of online conversations can help businesses process customer feedback and gather insights to improve their marketing efforts.

DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) will host a webinar for potential proposers June 23-24 to provide insight into key scientific and technical research areas the office plans to pursue in the coming year. DSO’s mission is to identify and create the next generation of scientific discovery by pursuing high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforming these initiatives into disruptive technologies for U.S. national security.

There is critical need to deploy portable point-of-care ultrasound to the battlefield where it could quickly and accurately address a broad range of injuries. However, logistical challenges, financial concerns and-most importantly-lack of frontline medical personnel trained with these instruments can hinder deploying the technology. DARPA’s Point-Of-Care Ultrasound Automated Interpretation (POCUS AI) program addresses these issues by advancing artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that interpret ultrasound images for medical personnel in austere environments.

Eight teams have qualified for the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge Systems Competition Final Event. On September 21-23, 2021, the teams’ robots will have to quickly navigate unfamiliar underground environments at the Louisville Mega Cavern in search of common items including backpacks, cell phones, trapped survivors, and even invisible gas. Those who find and identify the most items will win prizes of $2 million for 1st place, $1 million for 2nd place, and $500,000 for 3rd place.

The Department of Defense (DoD) is one of many government agencies that operates globally and is in constant contact with diverse cultures. Communicative understanding, not simply of local languages but also of social customs and cultural backgrounds, lies at the heart of Civil Affairs and Military Information Support Operations activities. These collectively comprise a vast majority of U.S. counterinsurgency and stabilization efforts.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Scott Wierzbanowski, a program manager since 2016 in the agency’s Tactical Technology Office, recounts how he came of age in a family of test pilots and then embraced the mission of fostering technologies for amplifying the capabilities of airmen, their aircraft, and other defense assets in the sky.

Today, the disclosure process for software vulnerabilities is fraught with challenges. Cybersecurity researchers and software security analysts are faced with an ethics versus efficacy dilemma when it comes to reporting or sharing discovered bugs. Revealing a vulnerability publicly may get the attention of the program’s developers and motivate a timely response, but it could also result in a lawsuit against the researcher. Further, public disclosure could enable bad actors to exploit the discovery before a patch or fix can be applied. Sharing the vulnerability directly with the software maker on the other hand is ethically sound, but may not necessarily prompt action. As history has shown, software makers are often reluctant or unwilling to engage with outside security teams and the disclosed vulnerabilities are frequently ignored, or corrective action is dangerously delayed.

Chemical and biological (CB) threats have become increasingly ubiquitous and diverse, presenting significant risks to warfighters in theater and stability operators during pandemic outbreaks. State-of-the-art personal protective equipment (PPE) can be bulky, heavy, and cumbersome, often severely limiting user mobility and performance. The Personalized Protective Biosystem (PPB) program aims to develop technology that reduces the need for burdensome protective equipment while increasing individual protection against CB threats.

DARPA has awarded contracts for the first phase of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program. The goal of the DRACO program is to demonstrate a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system above low Earth orbit in 2025. The three prime contractors are General Atomics, Blue Origin, and Lockheed Martin.

High performance computing (HPC) is a critical enabler of defense applications – from processing data at the tactical edge to powering weather prediction systems. Historically, the advancement of HPC has been driven by new generations of integrated circuit (IC) technologies and continuous improvements in transistor density, performance, and energy efficiency.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Whitney Mason, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Microsystems Technology Office, explains how she became smitten with the science and technology of imaging.

Although universal fault-tolerant quantum computers – with millions of physical quantum bits (or qubits) – may be a decade or two away, quantum computing research continues apace. It has been hypothesized that quantum computers will one day revolutionize information processing across a host of military and civilian applications from pharmaceuticals discovery, to advanced batteries, to machine learning, to cryptography. A key missing element in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum systems, however, is meaningful metrics to quantify how useful or transformative large quantum computers will actually be once they exist.

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is a scarce resource that is becoming increasingly congested and contested as demand for spectrum access continues to grow. Within this crowded environment, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) RF systems are hampered by mission-compromising interference from both self- and externally-generated signals.

Electronic oscillators lie at the heart of virtually all microelectronic systems, generating the clock signals used in digital electronics and the precise frequencies that enable radio frequency (RF) sensors and communications. While an ideal oscillator provides a perfect signal at a single frequency, imperfections degrade the spectral purity of real-world components. Such impairments, broadly quantified as phase noise, ultimately limit the performance of many military radars and commercial 5G systems. The issue is becoming increasingly burdensome as the airways become more congested and defense needs evolve.

DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program is half way through Phase 1 and has notched several key accomplishments in anticipation of live subscale aircraft dogfights in Phase 2 later this year. Achievements to date include: advanced virtual AI dogfights involving both within visual range (WVR) and beyond visual range (BVR) multi-aircraft scenarios with updated simulated weapons; live flights of an instrumented jet to measure pilot physiology and trust in AI; and initial modifications to the first full-scale jet trainer scheduled to host an onboard AI “pilot” in Phase 3 of the program.

DARPA today announced the Structured Array Hardware for Automatically Realized Applications (SAHARA) program, which aims to expand access to domestic manufacturing capabilities to tackle challenges hampering the secure development of custom chips for defense systems. Working in partnership with Intel and academic researchers from University of Florida, University of Maryland, and Texas A&M, SAHARA will leverage leading-edge, U.S.-based manufacturing capabilities to enable the automated and scalable conversion of defense-relevant field-programmable gate array (FPGAs) designs into quantifiably secure Structured ASICs. The program will also explore novel chip protections to support the manufacturing of silicon in zero-trust environments.

Stefanie Tompkins takes the reins today as the 23rd director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Bruce Draper, a program manager since 2019 in the agency’s Information Innovation Office, explains how his fascination with the ways people reason, think, and believe what they believe steered him into a lifelong embrace of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) research.

Protecting and preserving personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, intelligence insights, and other forms of sensitive information has never been more critical. A steady cadence of data breaches and attacks are reported seemingly daily. As the use of cloud computing and virtual networks becomes increasingly pervasive for storing, processing, and moving information, concerns around data vulnerability, access, and privacy are similarly on the rise.