IARPA Office of Anticipating Surprise issues funding opportunity

On January 14, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)’s Office of Anticipating Surprise issued a broad agency announcement (Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-15-04).

IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries. This BAA solicits abstracts/proposals for the Office for Anticipating Surprise (OAS).

OAS focuses on characterizing and reducing uncertainty through anticipatory intelligence. OAS is pursuing innovative new technology approaches that provide decision makers with timely and accurate forecasts of significant global events. This BAA solicits research that explores or demonstrates the feasibility of revolutionary concepts that may deliver real-time indications and warning, in context, to support rapid, nuanced understanding by intelligence consumers.

Research areas of particular interest to OAS include:
• Detection and forecasting of emergent phenomena (e.g., application of technical innovation and its adoption, novel cyber-attack methods, emerging infectious diseases).
• Automated generation and maintenance of taxonomies (e.g., scientific taxonomies, socio-political event taxonomies) across multiple facets. For example, research disciplines, applications, and methods could be different facets of a scientific taxonomy.
• Analysis and forecasting of rare events (e.g., catastrophic military conflicts, terrorist attacks, and pandemics).
• Quantitative risk assessments of emerging dual-use technologies.
• Causal inference from observational data.
• Methods for assessing capability and intent to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This research area includes:
o Data and methods to forecast technical progress towards development of critical sub-components of a WMD capability;
o Data and methods to detect and/or forecast major policy shifts of foreign governments, especially with respect to development of WMD.
• Methods for assessing capability and intent to leverage cyber capabilities against U.S. critical infrastructure.

This announcement seeks research ideas for topics that are not addressed by emerging or ongoing IARPA programs or other published IARPA solicitations. It is primarily, but not solely, intended for early stage research that may lead to larger, focused programs through a separate BAA in the future, so periods of performance generally 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. Research that primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice is specifically excluded.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps