IARPA is encouraging research to assist its office of incisive analysis

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has issued a broad agency announcement looking for research that can make “revolutionary” improvements in intelligence capabilities, and has listed 21 topics that are of interest to IARPA’s office of incisive analysis.

Proposals from interested parties are due by February 14, according to a solicitation notice published by IARPA on January 14.

Among the 21 proposed topics (which IARPA said were presented “in no particular order”) are methods for understanding how ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations and cultures; multi-disciplinary approaches to assessing linguistic data sets; methods for understanding and managing massive, dynamic data; multi-disciplinary approaches to processing noisy audio and speech; methods for geo-location of text and social media, and many other topics.

IARPA said it is seeking “early stage research that may lead to larger, focused programs through a separate BAA in the future.” For that reason, the period of performance for these projects will not exceed 12 months.

“Offerors should demonstrate that their proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to intelligence capabilities,” explains the IARPA notice. “Research that primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice is specifically excluded.”

Prospective offerors are encouraged to speak with the program manager in the office of incisive analysis whose interests are most closely aligned to their proposed research. This information is available by clicking here.

Further information about the BAA, in general, is available from Dr. Robert Neches, the office director, at dni-iarpa-baa-13-02@iarpa.gov.