DARPA Open Catalog Expands Listings to Include Research into Biological and Fundamental Sciences

The DARPA Open Catalog—a six-month-old public web portal that organizes and shares the results of DARPA research—today expanded its research listings to include peer-reviewed publications and other material from the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) and Defense Sciences Office (DSO). Along with that expansion, the website now offers open source software, peer-reviewed publications and other research materials from the majority of programs in the agency’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) that have public information to share.

Recognizing the value of DARPA’s efforts to make its research findings more publicly accessible, the Defense Department (DoD) recently selected the Open Catalog as one of two flagship initiatives under the Department’s Open Government Plan (OGP) for 2014.

DARPA launched the Open Catalog last February to complement other open-government initiatives and respond to queries from the R&D community and the general public about DARPA’s fundamental and applied research. The first batch of posted content comprised software toolkits and peer-reviewed publications from I2O’s XDATA program. Since then, the website has rapidly expanded its offerings:

• It has added 20 other I2O programs representing three of the office’s main research thrusts related to computer science: big data, cyber and language translation
• It has added research from BTO, which seeks to foster, demonstrate, and transition breakthrough fundamental research, discoveries and applications that integrate biology, engineering and computer science for national security
• It has added research from DSO, whose broad investment portfolio encompasses physics, chemistry and mathematics as well as multidisciplinary topics such as materials, supervised autonomy, novel sensing and complexity
• Its software library has more than quadrupled, from 75 to nearly 350 entries
• Its publication library has grown even faster to nearly 1,100 entries—10 times its original size

“The launch of the Open Catalog has been quite successful, both in terms of quickly sharing a lot of material and getting enthusiastic buy-in from key DARPA audiences,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “DARPA’s investments in a multitude of scientific fields over the past 50 years have helped define our high-technology world, and by sharing results through our Open Catalog, we hope to accelerate continued breakthroughs in key technical areas.” DARPA plans to expand research listings from BTO and DSO, and eventually include research from other DARPA technical offices as well.

The DARPA Open Catalog currently contains material from the following programs:

Biological Technologies Office (BTO):

• Revolutionizing Prosthetics (RP)

Defense Sciences Office (DSO):

• GRAPHS

Information Innovation Office (I2O):

Big Data:

• Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals (DCAPS)
• ENGAGE
• Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)
• XDATA

Cyber:

• Active Authentication
• Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales (ADAMS)
• Automated Program Analysis for Cybersecurity (APAC)
• Binary Executable Transforms (BET)
• Clean-slate design of Resilient Adaptive Secure Hosts (CRASH)
• Crowd Sourced Formal Verification (CSFV)
• Cyber Defense (Cyber Genome) 
• Cyber Fast Track (CFT) 
• Flashlight 
• High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS)
• Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC)
• Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning (PPAML)
• PROgramming Computation on EncryptEd Data (PROCEED) 
• SAFER Warfighter Communications (SAFER)

Language Translation:

• Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)
• Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT)
• Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS)

In addition to enhancing its holdings, DARPA recently improved the site’s user interface. Users can now search for specific material using tabs for software or publications or search the catalog as a whole. Easy color-coding helps users find research most relevant to their needs, with red ribbons highlighting new programs, yellow ribbons denoting programs with updated material and blue ribbons indicating programs scheduled to enter the Catalog soon.

The Open Catalog’s comprehensiveness and user-friendliness contributed to the DoD’s decision to highlight the portal in the Department’s latest Open Government Plan (OGP).

“DARPA has an open strategy to help increase the impact of government investments,” the Open Government Plan explains. “DARPA is also interested in building communities around government-funded software and research. The creation of the Open Catalog will help enable the development of these communities by directing interested web traffic to the code repositories for this software…. DARPA and the larger government will benefit from the development of these communities, who will hopefully test and evaluate elements of the software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”

The other DoD flagship initiative is the Department’s collaboration with the Department of Energy and Department of State to declassify formerly restricted documents related to U.S. nuclear programs. The initiative includes implementing a systematic review process for declassification and exploring ways for the public to help identify priorities for declassification review.

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