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Defense Sciences Office (DSO)

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DARPA's Defense Sciences Office (DSO) identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for U.S. national security. Current DSO themes include frontiers in math, computation and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating surprise. DSO relies on the greater scientific research community to help identify and explore ideas that could potentially revolutionize the state-of-the-art.

Useful links to work with DSO

Highlights

AMD

Discovering New Molecules for Military Applications

The efficient discovery and production of new molecules is essential for a range of military capabilities—from developing safe chemical warfare agent simulants and medicines to counter emerging threats, to coatings, dyes, and specialty fuels for advanced performance. Current approaches to develop molecules for specific applications, however, are intuition-driven, mired in slow iterative design and test cycles, and ultimately limited by the specific molecular expertise of the chemist who has to test each candidate molecule by hand.
Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE)

Accelerating the Exploration of Promising Artificial Intelligence Concepts

DARPA today announced its Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) program, a key component of the agency’s broader artificial intelligence (AI) investment strategy aimed at ensuring the United States maintains an advantage in this critical and rapidly accelerating technology area. AIE will constitute a series of unique funding opportunities that use streamlined contracting procedures and funding mechanisms to achieve a start date within three months of an opportunity announcement.
Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA)

Faster, Lighter, Smarter: DARPA Gives Small Autonomous Systems a Tech Boost

DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program recently completed Phase 2 flight tests, demonstrating advanced algorithms designed to turn small air and ground systems into team members that could autonomously perform tasks dangerous for humans – such as pre-mission reconnaissance in a hostile urban setting or searching damaged structures for survivors following an earthquake.

Tags

| Agency | Autonomy | Complexity | Fundamentals | Materials | Math | Sensors |

 

Opportunities

To view a selective listing of solicitations posted by this office please visit the DSO Opportunities page, where you can further sort by topic.

Programs

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µBRAIN

Dr. Michael Fiddy
The past decade has seen explosive growth in development and training of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. However, as AI has taken on progressively more complex problems, the amount of computation required to train the largest AI systems has been increasing ten-fold annually. While AI advances are beginning to have a deep impact in digital computing processes, trade-offs between computational capability, resources and size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) will become increasingly critical in the near future. More
| AI | Autonomy | Bio-systems | ISR | Neuroscience | Processing | SWAP |

Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS)

Dr. Rosa Alejandra Lukaszew
The ultimate goal of the DARPA Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS) is to demonstrate new, specialized benchtop technology that can solve large problems in complex physical systems on the hour timescale, compared to existing methods that require full cluster-scale supercomputing resources and take weeks to months. The core principle of the program is to leverage advances in optics, MEMS, additive manufacturing, and other emerging technologies to develop new non-traditional hybrid analog and digital computational means. More
| Algorithms | Complexity | Math | Processing |

Accelerated Molecular Discovery (AMD)

Dr. Anne Fischer
Efficient discovery and production of new molecules is essential to realize capabilities across the DoD, from simulants and medicines essential to counter emerging threats, to coatings, dyes and specialty fuels needed for advanced performance. More
| AI | Automation | Autonomy | Chemistry | Data | Fundamentals | Integration |

Agile Teams (A-Teams)

Dr. John S. Paschkewitz
The Agile Teams (A-Teams) program aims to discover, test, and demonstrate generalizable mathematical abstractions for the design of agile human-machine teams and to provide predictive insight into team performance. More
| Autonomy | Complexity | Interface | Math | Systems |

Agnostic Compact Demilitarization of Chemical Agents (ACDC)

Dr. Anne Fischer
Destroying bulk stores of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and organic precursors is a significant challenge for the international community. Today, for example, there are no approaches that exploit chemistries that are truly agnostic in terms of the agents that can be processed. In addition, current approaches require transport of agents from the storage site to a neutralization site. Ensuring safe transport of the agent can add significant cost and time to the process. More
| CBRN | Chemistry | Fundamentals | Materials |

All Together Now (ATN)

Dr. Tatjana Curcic
The goal of All Together Now (ATN) is to develop theoretical protocols and experimental techniques that enable new collective atom regimes, leading to sensitivities approaching the ultimate fundamental limits of performance. More
| Fundamentals | Photonics | PNT | Quantum |

Artificial Intelligence Research Associate (AIRA)

Dr. Jiangying Zhou
The Artificial Intelligence Research Associate (AIRA) program is part of a broad DAPRA initiative to develop and apply “Third Wave” AI technologies that are robust to sparse data and adversarial spoofing, and that incorporate domain-relevant knowledge through generative contextual and explanatory models. More
| AI | Algorithms | Analytics | Data |

Atoms to Product (A2P)

Dr. William Carter
Manufacturing by assembly provides the flexibility to freely combine materials and components and is fundamental to creating devices from cell phones to appliances to airplanes. However, assembly processes are currently not practical at the nanoscale. The A2P program was conceived to deliver scalable technologies for assembly of nanometer- to micron-scale components—which frequently possess unique characteristics due to their small size—into larger, human-scale systems. More
| Manufacturing | Materials | Microstructures | Processing |

Competency-Aware Machine Learning (CAML)

Dr. Jiangying Zhou
In order to transform machine learning systems from tools into partners, users need to trust their machine counterpart. One component to building a trusted relationship is knowledge of a partner’s competence (an accurate insight into a partner’s skills, experience, and reliability in dynamic environments). While state-of-the-art machine learning systems can perform well when their behaviors are applied in contexts similar to their learning experiences, they are unable to communicate their task strategies, the completeness of their training relative to a given task, the factors that may influence their actions, or their likelihood to succeed under specific conditions. More
| Adaptability | AI | Algorithms | Autonomy | Trust |

Complex Adaptive System Composition And Design Environment (CASCADE)

Dr. John S. Paschkewitz
System-of-Systems (SoS) architectures are increasingly central in managing defense, national security and urban infrastructure applications. However, it is difficult to model and currently impossible to systematically design such complex systems using existing tools, which has led to inferior performance, unexpected problems and weak resilience. More
| Complexity | Math | Systems |