IARPA posts MOSAIC BAA

On September 26, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity  released the broad agency announcement Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals with Context (MOSAIC). Responses are due by 5:00pm Eastern on November 10.

This BAA (IARPA-BAA-16-10) is for the MOSAIC program.  IARPA is seeking innovative solutions for the MOSAIC program in this BAA.  The goal of the MOSAIC program is to improve the Intelligence Community’s capabilities to evaluate its workforce throughout their careers. The program aims to advance multimodal sensing to measure personnel and their environment unobtrusively, passively, and persistently both at work and outside of work, reduce the time and manpower required to process and integrate such data, and construct personalized and adaptive assessments of an individual that are accurate throughout the individual’s career.  The MOSAIC program is envisioned to begin in May 2017 and end by November 2020.

The Intelligence Community (IC) needs to ensure its workforce is well-suited for the psychological and cognitive demands that are present across a variety of its missions. Capabilities that enhance the accuracy of individual evaluations will help maintain optimal job performance throughout an individual’s career and proactively identify changes in an individual that may impact their work.  Such capabilities are particularly relevant as the pace and complexity of the challenges facing the IC workforce continue to increase, putting even greater burdens on individuals and organizations to keep pace and adapt.

Current tools to evaluate the workforce, such as interviews, cognitive assessments, and questionnaires, while often highly predictive of job performance, may only provide a snapshot of an individual in a controlled testing environment. As such, they may not capture more dynamic or context-dependent aspects of an individual. Traditional tools may suffer other limitations, such as lengthy administration times or susceptibility to measurement artifacts (e.g., practice effects, impression management, test anxiety).

To address such limitations, the MOSAIC program seeks to fund rigorous, high-quality research to develop and validate unobtrusive, passive, and persistent sensor-based methods to assess stable and dynamic psychological, cognitive, and physiological aspects of an individual. The research will take advantage of advancements in sensors, data collection architectures, feature extraction methods, data fusion techniques, as well as the modeling and analysis of rich spatiotemporal data generated from the collection of an individual’s daily actions and responses. Performers will employ a variety of sensors (mobile, worn, and carried sensors, social media applications, etc.) to measure individuals and the environment around them (e.g., time, light, temperature, sound, interpersonal interactions) to develop personalized and contextualized assessments of an individual over time.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps