On December 23,
the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) posted a broad agency
announcement for Multi-Source Exploitation Assistant for the Digital Enterprise
(MEADE). For FY 21 funding, AFRL recommends that white papers be submitted by March
27.
Seeking
innovative research to develop a vetted digital assistant that provides
analytical answers within operator-driven timelines. The software must perform
constrained analytical tasks specified by user in the form of a question and
include software agents that perform tasks independently (question answering).
Total
funding for this BAA is approximately $24.9M. Individual awards will not
normally exceed 36 months with dollar amounts normally ranging from $100K to
$3M. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value as long
as the value does not exceed the available BAA ceiling amount.
The
Air Force Research Laboratory, Information Fusion Branch, is soliciting white
papers under this Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for research, development,
integration, test and evaluation of technologies/techniques to provide an
interactive question answering system that functions as a virtual assistant by
performing analytical tasks or services for an analyst.
Multi-INT
analysis efficiencies need to be increased in order to match the complexity,
velocity, variety, and volume of intelligence data being collected against
increasingly agile and deceptive adversaries. The MEADE objective is to make
complex analytics possible for nearly anyone, regardless of their technical
ability. This effort is intended to not only support an Intelligence function,
but also Command and Control functions (to make a decision). For purposes of
MEADE, an ‘analytic’ is defined as a process that discovers, interprets and
communicates meaningful patterns in order to describe, predict, or improve
knowledge of Entities, Events, and Relationships in context.
The intent is to provide analytics that answer questions directly or that will interact with the user to help steer analysts to an answer rather than simply providing a ranked list of potential information sources to help the analyst answer the question themselves.
Full information is available here.
Source: SAM
By 
