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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 accelerating scientific discovery, exploring fundamental limits, and creating strategic 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

Nascent Light-Matter Interactions (NLM)

Developing “ABCs” for Exploiting New Phenomena in Light-Matter Interactions

A unique class of engineered light-manipulating materials, known as metamaterials or structured materials, makes use of patterns of strongly interacting wavelength or sub-wavelength-sized elements. Because of these intricate internal and surface structures, new properties have emerged, some exhibiting behavior that has resulted in rewriting long-understood “laws” for how light and other electromagnetic (EM) waves interact with materials. These materials have been opening up new options for controlling EM waves in many technological arenas, among them imaging, thermal control, and frequency conversion. Specific applications include night-vision, heat reflection and management in aircraft engines, and temperature regulation of electronics on satellites in the hot-and-cold extremes of space.
Young Faculty Award

Young Faculty Award 2018 Research Topics Announced

DARPA published its Young Faculty Award (YFA) 2018 Research Announcement today, seeking proposals in 26 different topic areas—the largest number of YFA research areas ever solicited.
Disruptioneering

Disruptioneering: Streamlining the Process of Scientific Discovery

DARPA’s Defense Sciences office (DSO)—whose mission is to identify and pursue high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines—today announced the first programs under its new Disruptioneering effort, which pushes for faster identification and exploration of bold and risky ideas with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery.

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| 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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Accelerated Computation for Efficient Scientific Simulation (ACCESS)

Dr. Jim Gimlett
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 |

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. Jim Gimlett
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 |

Atoms to Product (A2P)

Dr. John Main
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 |

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 |

Deep Purposeful Learning (Deep Purple)

Dr. Jim Gimlett
Deep Purple aims to advance the modeling of complex dynamic systems using new information-efficient approaches that make optimal use of data and known physics at multiple scales. The program is investigating next-generation deep learning approaches that use not only high throughput multimodal scientific data from observations and controlled experiments (including behaviors such as phase transitions and chaos), but also of the known science of such systems at whatever scales it exists. More
| AI | Algorithms | Bio-complexity | Data |

Driven and Nonequilibrium Quantum Systems (DRINQS)

Dr. Rosa Alejandra Lukaszew
DRINQS is a fundamental science program that aims to investigate a recent paradigm shift in quantum research, which maintains that periodically driving a system out of equilibrium may increase the length of time that its quantum state endures. DRINQS aims to investigate this phenomenon and demonstrate significant gains over conventional states in timekeeping, field sensing, and information processing for use in national security applications. More
| Materials | PNT |

Enabling Quantification of Uncertainty in Physical Systems (EQUiPS)

Dr. Jan Vandenbrande
Complex physical systems, devices and processes important to the Department of Defense (DoD) are often poorly understood due to uncertainty in models, parameters, operating environments and measurements. The goal of DARPA’s Enabling Quantification of Uncertainty in Physical Systems (EQUiPS) program is to provide a rigorous mathematical framework and advanced tools for propagating and managing uncertainty in the modeling and design of complex physical and engineering systems. Of particular interest to the program are systems with multi-scale coupled physics and uncertain parameters in extremely high-dimensional spaces, such as new aerospace vehicles and engines. More
| Complexity | Math |

Extended Solids (XSolids)

Dr. John S. Paschkewitz
Materials with superior strength, density and resiliency properties are important for the harsh environments in which Department of Defense platforms, weapons and their components operate. Recent scientific advances have opened up new possibilities for material design in the ultrahigh pressure regime (up to three million times higher than atmospheric pressure). Materials formed under ultrahigh pressure, known as extended solids, exhibit dramatic changes in physical, mechanical and functional properties and may offer significant improvements to armor, electronics, propulsion and munitions systems in any aerospace, ground or naval platform. More
| Manufacturing | Materials |