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Visionaries Need Apply

DARPA looking for a few good—and new—ideas.

The military agency known for its bleeding-edge technology capabilities is reaching out to small, innovative, tech-savvy companies and research teams that they have not worked with in the past. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO) invites companies and university researchers to attend Sync with STO, taking place August 2 and 3 at its conference center in Arlington, Virginia.

During each day, DARPA program managers and attendees collaboratively will assess military challenges and synthesize potential technology solutions during two workshop sessions. The same sessions will be offered both days.

Topics for discussion include identifying creative and effective solutions to strategic problems for the U.S. military; unconventional global security problems; and challenges associated with design, fielding and operation of complex, adaptive capabilities.

Tom Burns, director, STO, explains that his team is looking forward to engaging with a wide spectrum of industries, academia and technologists who can provide unique insights and advanced commercial technologies that could be applied in new ways to achieve STO’s vision. “We’re encouraging attendance by lead solutions people, not just business development representatives,” he says.

The STO is developing “effects webs” that dominate engagements across the conflict spectrum for highly contested force-on-force conflicts to gray zone conflicts where the enemy is not as easily identifiable and civilians may be intermingled with combatants. By seamlessly orchestrating sensors and command and control nodes and delivering effects via a distributed mosaic network of manned and unmanned platforms, STO seeks to turn complexity into a new and powerful asymmetric weapon.

To achieve these goals, the STO is developing key enabling technologies, systems and composable systems-of-systems in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, both sensors and seekers; battle management, command and control; communications and networking; and electronic warfare.

More details about Sync with STO and registration is available online