Day 1

When the more than 50 early-career DARPA Risers entered the briefing room on the second floor of America’s Convention Center in St. Louis, they were not expecting the rock star’s welcome they received from DARPA's program managers, office directors and deputies, and top leadership, including Director Arati Prabhakar and Deputy Director Steven Walker. The applause and hooting went on for a solid two minutes.

“We are excited to be with you today, to hear about your ideas and how they could lead to breakthrough technologies for national security,” Walker said in the moments before the Risers — who are graduates, post-docs and early career researchers — took up positions by the posters they prepared to explain and show off those ideas.

The posters are testimony to the diversity and audacity of the minds of these Risers, who are the sorts of investigators DARPA researchers would hope to partner with in the future. The Riser program is all about DARPA scientists and engineers meeting and greeting this next generation of potential disrupters at the leading edges of science and technology.

Bamboo Binaries: Flexible Programs That Bend Rather Than Break was one of poster titles. With this computer security concept, Per Larsen, a postdoctoral scholar in computer science at the University of California, Irvine, and who is associated with Immunant Inc., aims to help out consumers and users of closed-source software who, he says, “are more or less at the mercy of the software vendors with respect to mitigation of software vulnerabilities. There is nothing much a user can do, short of altogether ceasing to use the software in question until a patch is available and has been installed.” Larsen wants to put an end to that near-term helplessness.

Antifragile Communications

As his poster indicated, DARPA Riser Marc Lichman, an electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech, is developing the concept of “antifragile communications,” which he explains as “the capability for a wireless communications system to improve in performance due to some type of stressor or harsh condition. The term 'antifragile' refers to systems that increase in capability, resilience, or robustness as a result of mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures.” Not exactly an intuitive idea.

With her project, Desalination through highly-mismatched solar energy conversion, Emily Tow, an electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate at MIT, seeks to achieve efficient solar desalination by driving breakthrough innovations that would allow the energy of a single photon from the sun to, as she puts it, “instigate a smaller change in the state of tens to thousands of molecules.” In that way, she surmises, it will be possible to separate water from formerly dissolved salt components in ways that have not been done before.

Ideas Played out in Kaleidoscopic Splendor

Quantum computers inspired by the way plants harvest and use solar energy during photosynthesis. Reinventing computing with integrated photonics; that is, with photons rather than electrons. Antisense polynucleotide analogs for new classes of antibiotics. A project that starts with previously inscrutable data but then runs physical models to tease out the causes of the data. Among the goals: to make biological measurements that seemed impossible before. One of the more mind-bending poster titles went like this: Entanglement as the fabric of spacetime.

DSO Deputy Director Bill Regli, one of the originators of the DARPA Risers program, could not have been more pleased by the depth and diversity of the research he was learning about. “Almost all of them have these world-changing goals,” he said, pointing out how DARPAesque that attitude is. “I hope this experience is transformative for them and their careers.” Given that some of the Risers would have the opportunity to lunch with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and to share their projects in front of 1,400 attendees at the Wait, What? forum, chances are good that that Regli’s hope will be realized.