IARPA

The U.S. intelligence community is teaming with entrepreneurs to develop the next generation of technologies. While government scientists continue to pursue highly classified work, the private sector is providing new capabilities that complement or even pioneer technologies needed by the community. Government research efforts are making room for unclassified work that can provide innovative capabilities needed for the full spectrum of intelligence operations.

Two research programs at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as IARPA, are now undergoing evaluation to see if they may provide solutions to help counter the growing COVID-19 pandemic, IARPA director Catherine Marsh tells SIGNAL Magazine.

If Hollywood were to create a movie about CIA human intelligence gathering, it would need to be more Mission Impossible than James Bond, more about teamwork and technical expertise than individual exploits, says Dawn Meyerriecks, who leads the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is seeking information on research efforts in the area of machine learning with a particular focus on deep learning and in the area of cooling systems for small mobile devices.

Researchers working on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community are kicking off a program designed to develop a revolutionary capability for monitoring objects in geostationary orbit, including functioning satellites and hundreds of thousands of bits of space debris. The program will attempt to provide low-cost approaches for passive ground-based interferometric imaging of space objects, a technique using two or more telescopes or lenses.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has established a multiyear research plan to build 3-D models that leverage satellite imagery to support the nation’s military, humanitarian and intelligence missions. The Creation of Operationally Realistic 3-D Environment (CORE3D) program is intended to significantly reduce the time it takes to build 3-D models.

Geospatial imagery as well as facial recognition and other biometrics are driving the intelligence community’s research into artificial intelligence. Other intelligence activities, such as human language translation and event warning and forecasting, also stand to gain from advances being pursued in government, academic and industry research programs funded by the community’s research arm.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is working toward breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, or AI, through a number of research programs. All these AI programs tap expertise in government, industry or academia.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host two proposers’ day conferences later this month in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area in anticipation of new solicitations. 

The first, for the Homomorphic Encryption Computing Techniques with Overhead Reduction (HECTOR) program, will be held on July 26. The second, for the Finding Engineering-Linked Indicators (FELIX) program, will be held the next day. Both will begin at 9:00 a.m.

Diverse sciences ranging from forensics to nanoscale chemical sampling and storage are among the research opportunities being targeted by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to support future U.S. intelligence community activities. Some of these research areas are offered in a series of proposers’ days in advance of broad agency announcements, while others have passed that step and are in the request for information stage.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has awarded a research contract in support of the Quantum Enhanced Optimization (QEO) program to an international team led by the University of Southern California. With the award, IARPA, which is within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, embarked on a multi-year research effort to develop special-purpose algorithms and hardware that harness quantum effects to surpass conventional computing.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, has selected its winners from its crowd-sourced Multi-View Stereo 3-D Mapping Challenge—a contest to see who could best convert satellite photos into 3-D models to create more accurate maps.

The top challenge solvers demonstrated their solutions during an all-day workshop Wednesday in Washington, D.C. The open source solutions were released during the event and will be made available to the public on an IARPA website.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) recently released the Virtuous User Environment (VirtUE) broad agency announcement. The goal of the VirtUE program is to create and demonstrate a more secure interactive user computing environment by leveraging the federal government’s impending migration to commercial cloud-based information technology infrastructures and the current explosion of new virtualization and operating system concepts.

Proposals are due December 12.

The CIA’s newest directorate consolidates several technology business units into one hub organization focused on deeply embracing innovative approaches and capabilities throughout the agency. As part of an effort to make digitization commonplace in both operations and analysis, the CIA also will work with industry to speed up the adoption of cutting-edge technologies. To start, the agency will add some of the latest data capabilities in the infosphere, and then it will nurture new technologies as they emerge from laboratories in government and industry. 

A group of University of Maryland (UMD) researchers has developed an algorithm that can not only detect a face, but also simultaneously determine the gender and pose, and extract fiducial, or reference, points.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has provided funding and support for the invention, which has been dubbed HyperFace. The algorithm simultaneously detects faces; finds facial landmarks, including eye center, nose tip, etc.; estimates the head pose; and recognizes the person’s gender from any real-world images and videos, Rama Chellappa, UMD chair of electrical and computer engineering, said in a written announcement.

The U.S. Air Force has awarded a team led by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) a $9.4 million contract to develop a component of a novel geolocation system that will detect and locate communications and other high-frequency signals with unprecedented accuracy. The program, funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), will integrate a high-fidelity ionospheric model with a geolocation system for the first time to achieve this level of precision.

U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.

Four teams will share a grand prize of $110,000 for their work on the speech recognition challenge Automatic Speech Recognition in Reverberant Environments, or ASpIRE.

The winning teams are from Johns Hopkins University, Raytheon BBN Technologies, the Institute for Infocomm Research and Brno University of Technology, according to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is looking for a few good ideas. The organization’s Office for Anticipating Surprise has initiated a competition for its Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment (CAUSE) program, which aims at discovering ways to anticipate cyber attacks before they occur.