What’s in a Name? | Ep 93

Intro Voices
Coming to DARPA is like grabbing the nose cone of a rocket and holding on for dear life.

DARPA is a place where if you don't invent the internet, you only get a “B.”

A DARPA program manager quite literally invents tomorrow.

Coming to work every day and being humbled by that.

DARPA is not one person or one place. It's a collection of people that are excited about moving technology forward.

Tom Shortridge
Hello, and welcome to Voices from DARPA. I’m your host, Tom Shortridge.  

To prevent and create strategic surprise, an organization must be willing to routinely reinvent itself. Throughout DARPA's nearly 70-year history, its technical offices have reflected this reality - constantly starting, ending, morphing, and combining to match the rapid pace of technological change.  

In that spirit, the agency recently shifted the identities of two key offices. The Microsystems Technology Office has broadened its scope to become the Multi X Office: MXO, while the Information Innovation Office is looking to its historic roots, renaming itself the Information Processing Techniques Office – I-P-T-O, or IPTO.  

In this episode, we’ll hear from the leadership of both offices about the power of a name, and how these specific changes signal a renewed focus on solving the world's most urgent problems.

Jonathan Hoffman
Our PMs come here to make the biggest and boldest bets that they can, and if our name is inhibiting them and it’s telling us that we can’t work on something that is the thing that the department needs, we have a problem.

Tom Shortridge
That’s Jonathan Hoffman, deputy director of MXO.  

You might remember Whitney Mason, director of MXO, from our “More than Microchips” episode, where she talked about moving MTO towards advancements far beyond conventional chipmaking. Listening to that episode with hindsight, you can pick up on seeds of her vision to expand the office, but it was a single inciting incident that crystallized the need for a larger change – or maybe it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Whitney Mason
One of the program managers brought us an amazing idea. Big, huge, gnarly problem. Something that industry is talking about all the time. Something that the administration is talking about all the time. I'm talking about the SMASH program. And what SMASH is trying to do is try to take any ore that you have and extract every single element out of it, at high purity. Oh, I didn't mention: do it at exactly the same efficiency that you're able to do one material right now.  

We're working through the engineering, the science, trying to figure out if this is possible. And one of my front office staff, a brilliant guy, says to me, 'You can't do that. That's not a microsystem.' And I said, 'That's it. We're done.' That's not our name, because we have to redefine what the office is able to do.

This push to redefine boundaries isn’t isolated to one office. Across DARPA, leaders recognize a broader shift – a transformation in technology that demands fresh perspectives. Here’s J.F. Mergen, deputy director of the office now known as IPTO.

J.F. Mergen
We're in a period of great technological ferment. The explosive movement of AI, the ability to sense and communicate freely on a global basis and at very high bandwidth, the ability to marshal large collections of thinkers about mathematics, about very large systems. It's a pivot point.  

Tom Shortridge
When people at DARPA find themselves at these kinds of pivot points, a common tactic is to question foundational assumptions and ask tough questions: why are we doing things this way? In this instance: what does a tech office’s name really mean?

Whitney Mason
I was very fortunate before I got this job to be the deputy director in the Strategic Technology Office. And I loved going places because people would say, "what, exactly, is strategic technology?" and I would say, "It's whatever the Department needs us to be."

On the first day that I came back to MTO, I asked everybody, you know, "What's the definition of a microsystem?" And we all sort of stared at each other, sort of blankly, like, "What exactly does that mean?"

I think what we think of a microsystem is something that is rooted in silicon digital circuits. Right? And so we added things into the bucket. We added MEMS into the bucket. We added photonics. We added quantum sensors. We added batteries. We added these things to it. But we found that when we talked to the community, they were all rooted with silicon. It was silicon plus those things, not those things as standalone technologies. I think what we've realized is that we need to view silicon as a tool in the toolbox, not the core tool of the toolbox.

We're expanding beyond just thinking about things in physics. Right? We're thinking about all of the physical sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, etc.  

One of the things that I always say is that the office is the tide that raises all ships. Which means that we're multi-domain. We're multidisciplinary, we're multi-scale. Right. We’re the office of tiny things with big impact, which means that we're at the atomic scale, the molecular scale, the cellular scale. Multidisciplinary, multi-science, multifunction, multi-domain. It's changing into something that's multiplicative. We are greater than the sum of our parts.  

And so we really wanted to embrace that concept of expanding and interesting things happen at the seams. And the more things that you put into that multi spot, the more seams you have and the more magic occurs. And so here we are: Multi X.

MXO is not a new office. MXO has expanded from MTO. I don't think that we're losing our roots. I think that we want to ride on the glory that MTO was and expand beyond that and become more glorious and be something that all of the alumni of this office can be proud of.

Tom Shortridge
While MXO is honoring the legacy of MTO, the office formerly known as the Information Innovation Office is giving a nod to its own history with a different approach: bringing a legendary name out of retirement to set the stage for what comes next. Here’s JF again, joined by Pat Lincoln, director of the office.

J.F. Mergen
We are moving forward into the future, but through a transformation to a name that already has a great deal of recognition. Inside of computer geeks, people who love networking, people who are fascinated by how machines think. In that universe, it's well known.

Patrick Lincoln
The Information Processing Techniques Office, starting in the 1960s, was involved in the origins of artificial intelligence, of computer networking, of cybersecurity and privacy, and an understanding of complex systems. We're going back to that future, changing our name again to the Information Processing Techniques Office, in part because we want to reconsider the foundations of artificial intelligence and other areas.  

J.F. Mergen
So that name is associated with the idea of doing things that are completely different, completely unexpected, and make you sit back and think, "I didn't know I could do that. I didn't realize that I could think about information, that I could think about data in this way." But now that I can, all this other stuff gets enabled. The world changes.

Patrick Lincoln
And what are the limits of where that can take us, to help solve some of the world's most urgent, critical problems. Based on those foundations from the past, using techniques of the present, from the commercial world, and motivated by problems identified by DARPA program managers that are there urgently in the world that, if we solve them, the world's a better place.  

Tom Shortridge
That brings us back to what an office title actually does at DARPA, which is to define the sandbox for program managers. And those boundaries can be as precise as a sand table – or as sprawling as a desert.

Whitney Mason
One of the things that I love about the name of the office is that it allows the program managers, and the needs of the economy and the needs of the Department to drive what this actually looks like.

The way we're thinking about this right now, is we still have a lot of our core mission. We're thinking about energy and compute, which has been a traditional part of the office. And I think that that will continue. We're thinking about materials, but we're thinking about it in a more expanded way. Not just "how do I grow perfect materials," but "how do I leverage the biology, the chemistry, and the physics in order to make material discovery faster."  

We're thinking about branching out into autonomous hardware and seeing what we can do from that perspective. But we still embrace our core mission, always. Which is sensors, communications, compute, orienting. All the things that the Department needs in order to be successful.

J.F. Mergen
Information is all information in all forms. Processing is how we transform that information from where it is to where it's useful to have, and what actuators we will use on that. Techniques is what are the algorithms we're using and what are the approaches that we're using.

Patrick Lincoln
We are now building three technical thrust areas. They resonate with or have a resonance with past I2O and past IPTO efforts, fundamentally: AI, cyber, and complex systems.  

J.F. Mergen
On the AI side, we're not trying to build new foundation models. How do we exploit artificial intelligence? How do we find gaps in what can be done with artificial intelligence and pursue those?  

Patrick Lincoln
Not just transformers on a GPU, but what's the next algorithm and perhaps the algorithm after that that could achieve dramatic reduction in size, weight, and power used that allow them to be used right at the edge, right in your hand, as opposed to needing a giant server room to execute and provide those kinds of answers.  

We're also building a technology thrust area of inherent cybersecurity and privacy. We're hoping to build systems that inherently protect that privacy—say, in medical records or travel records, that are somewhat private or very, very private information. We're also trying to protect cybersecurity in that same sense, building systems that are inherently protective of one's cybersecurity stance.  

And the third technology thrust area is resilient mega-systems. By which we mean systems that are incredibly complex, that maybe have a million subsystems, each one of which is a complex system itself, perhaps. Just unprecedented scale that is now emerging on battlefields and in the commercial world. We’re thinking of megasystems like a swarm of UAVs with a million UAVs in it, systems like the electric power grid, again, with active control of many, many components, that may have in combination resonances that may be dangerous or may be beneficial. We're trying to understand these complex systems and the emergent behaviors that come out of them, in ways that we can, first of all, understand and, secondly, control.

Tom Shortridge
Adapting to that massive scale isn't something that happens all at once. The new office names are less of a sudden departure, and more of an official nod to a shift that was already underway. Ultimately, capturing that momentum with new titles is about forcing a mindset shift—prompting everyone to step back from the everyday details and refocus on the big picture of the mission.

Jonathan Hoffman
You could see Whitney's vision of the office growing over the last few years as we incorporated biology, chemistry, and materials science as we expanded into new areas, but keeping the same principles there, but with really big bets in terms of Crystal Palace, where this is still core, historical MTO developments, but moving beyond, say, just silicon.  

And so we've seen this growth and this expansion where I think it really hit with Promethean Clay and SMASH coming together, working towards larger things that people might say, "That's not a microsystem. Why are you working on that?" But as we've evolved to think about the expanding threat space, the expanding landscape, the expanding technological gaps we're viewing, it's become a necessity that we work into those areas.

I think what it's doing to the PMs is trying to get them to think much bigger than staring down—and I mean this in the best possible way—staring down at the very specific component, but looking up toward that big, strategic surprise.  

Even today, right before this, I sat down with a PM, and he turned to me and said, 'You know, I had all these topics that I was working on, and I think I've distracted myself with the science from the strategic surprise.'  

He actually said it much better than that. He quoted a monk. I think he said, 'The finger points at the moon; don't confuse the finger for the moon.' And so his point was, "I've been looking at the finger and all of my fingers, rather than at the strategic surprise."And I think that through this reinvestment in strategy and thought process has gotten everyone thinking differently.

J.F. Mergen
Our goal is to create or prevent strategic surprise. That's the straightforward answer. But if we can come up with new mechanisms to process information, if we can come up with the new techniques, the new meta-techniques, we can protect and provide resilience to our nation, that will make us inherently more secure and make us far more resilient to surprise.

The name is not going to change us, but the name may change how we think about what our responsibilities are. And so the name change drives home to myself, our office director, our PMs, our performers, that we are sitting in this change point, and we have to think about this change.  

Tom Shortridge
It’s hard to change how you think if everybody in the room has the exact same background. A big part of navigating this transition is simply opening the doors to a totally different crowd of problem-solvers.

Patrick Lincoln
As we're reshaping ourselves, we want to broaden the scope of our user base, of our transition partners, and of our performers, to include startups that might not think of the government as a customer base. We hope that they would consider DARPA a place where they might find interesting work. We also are looking to expand into non-defense parts of corporations. So perhaps, agricultural or pharmaceutical companies that might not normally be thinking of DARPA as a place to go for business.  

We're looking for people with a certain mathematical sophistication, but not necessarily a degree in computer science. Traditionally, it has attracted folks who are very computer science-oriented. And that's not a bad thing. It's a fine field. I myself have a degree in computer science.  

But the attraction of IPTO is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work that can draw staff with degrees from various disciplines and perhaps no degree. We're not very degree-biased in that sense, but with a great idea, with some passion about a problem, a new idea, a new technique that might revolutionize the world.  

Part of what we're looking for are risk-takers in the technology sense; people who are excited about the potential for something, even if they can't for sure see their way all the way to execution and showing it out into the field. That there's risk involved, there's research involved, but that they have the passion to go give it a try.  

Whitney Mason
Those that will question the assumptions of the past. To say, right, "The community has always believed X, but really and truly, let's rethink that. Is that still true?" Technology changes. And let's question the assumptions of the past to see if we can do something going forward.  

I really want people that are willing to suspend belief a little bit. And ignore what you know to be true and ask the questions and discover if there's opportunities in other spaces. I think that the people that will find this vision most exciting are the people that enjoy the pit in their stomach, that enjoy saying, 'I'm not positive this will work, but science says that it will, so let's try.' That's, I think, the people that we most want to have in the office.  

Tom Shortridge
If you manage to build a team of unconventional thinkers and give them the freedom to try radical new ideas, the next logical step is figuring out exactly where to aim them.

Patrick Lincoln
'What is the world's most urgent, critical problem?' I've asked a lot of people this question. And my favorite answer to that, I'll call it the ARPA answer, or the DARPA answer, to this question is: the world's most urgent, critical problem is improving our collective ability to solve urgent, critical problems.  

DARPA is unique in building these programs and projects that are focused on solving a particular problem in a very focused and urgent way of being able to innovate and experiment with things. Sometimes it doesn't work. But when it does, DARPA programs have had enormous impact. At the time those ARPA programs were started, it was considered risky or impossible to do those things. I want to be in those kinds of places. I want to be in a place that is able to take those kinds of risks, to do projects that have the potential for high impact, even if they are risky.

Tom Shortridge
Ultimately, DARPA is just a collection of people willing to take massive bets on the unknown. And even as the acronyms on the doors change, that fundamental culture of risk-taking doesn't budge. That core drive to solve the impossible remains the bedrock of the place. MXO and IPTO are just the latest examples of DARPA pulling up the floorboards and reshaping itself to make sure it's always ready for whatever comes next.

That’s all for this episode. For more information on MXO and IPTO, we’ll have links in the show notes. As always, thanks for listening.