To accelerate the development of new infectious disease forecasting methods, DARPA launched its CHIKV Challenge. The chikungunya virus (CHIKV) first appeared in the Americas in 2013 but was quickly spreading and by mid-2015, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) had tallied close to 1.4 million suspected cases and more than 33,000 confirmed. Spread by mosquitoes, chikungunya is rarely fatal but can cause debilitating joint and muscle pain, fever, nausea, fatigue, and rash, and poses a growing public health and national security risk.

At a mountaintop event in New Mexico, DARPA handed off ownership of its Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) from an Agency-led design and construction program to ownership and operation by U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), which operate the telescope in Australia jointly with the Australian government.

SST has moved space situational awareness from seeing only a few large objects at a time through the equivalent of a drinking straw, to a “windshield” view with 10,000 objects at a time, each as small as a softball.

The goal of the SIGMA program, which began in 2014, was to develop and test low-cost, high-efficiency radiation sensors that detect gamma and neutron radiation and to network them via smartphones. This would create a distributed detection network that would provide city, state, and federal officials with real-time awareness of potential nuclear and radiological threats such as dirty bombs, which combine conventional explosives and radioactive material to increase their disruptive potential.

The 21st century has brought with it the ever more urgent need for automated, scalable, machine-speed vulnerability detection and patching as more and more systems—from household appliances to major military platforms—get connected to, and become dependent upon, the internet. Finding and countering bugs, hacks, and other cyber infection threats have effectively been artisanal: professional bug hunters, security coders, and other security pros work endless hours, searching millions of lines of code to find and fix vulnerabilities that those with ulterior motives can exploit.

The increased use of wireless and internet-enabled devices—from smartphones and computers to cars and home appliances—and the data they generate are creating opportunities and challenges for the defense and commercial sectors. 

To help explore and better understand the complex relationship created by the intersection of physical and cyber technology within the ever more congested electromagnetic spectrum, DARPA embarked on a year-long effort to build an engaged community of engineers and scientists operating within relevant technical areas.

To help make effective swarm tactics with small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other robots a reality, DARPA planned and organized the Service Academies Swarm Challenge, a collaboration between the Agency and the three U.S. military Service academies—the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy. 

An experiment at its heart, the research effort was designed to encourage students to develop innovative offensive and defensive tactics for swarms of small UAVs.

In collaboration with the non-profit Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), DARPA recruited a consortium of cost-sharing industry partners to fund and oversee the Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP). 

Like a related predecessor program, STARnet, JUMP consists of a half-dozen university-based research centers, each dedicated to a different technology theme and collectively supporting fundamental microelectronics research of hundreds of professional scientists and their students. 

DARPA took its Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program to one of the best finish lines the Agency knows ofan official transfer of a technology to a follow-on steward of development or to an end user in the field. 

In this case, following a period of open-water tests of the programs demonstration vesseldubbed Sea Hunterto the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the latter organization officially took over responsibility of developing the revolutionary prototype vehicle as the Medium Displacement Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MDUSV). 

DARPA announced a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion on artificial intelligence research and development in a portfolio of some 50 new and existing programs collectively called the “AI Next” campaign. 

Key areas of the ambitious campaign include: 

In 2016, DARPA rolled out a new Grand Challenge, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), with the goal of ensuring that the exponentially growing number of military and civilian wireless devices have ready access to increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum when needed.