IARPA Office of Incisive Analysis opens new funding opportunity

By Loren Blinde May 12, 2015

0 Comments

On May 11, IARPA’s Office of Incisive Analysis posted a broad agency announcement (BAA). IARPA is soliciting proposals for research that will maximize insight from the information the Intelligence Community collects, in a timely fashion (Solicitation Number: IARPA-BAA-15-02). The BAA’s closing date is May 10, 2016; however, proposals are encouraged at any time during the BAA’s open period.

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 of Incisive Analysis (IA).

IA focuses on maximizing insights from the massive, disparate, unreliable and dynamic data that are – or could be – available to analysts, in a timely manner. IARPA is pursuing new sources of information from existing and novel data, and developing innovative techniques that can be utilized in the processes of analysis. IA programs are in diverse technical disciplines but have the following common features: (a) they create technologies that can earn the trust of the analyst user by providing the reasoning for results; and (b) they address data uncertainty and provenance explicitly.

The following topics (in no particular order) are of interest to IA:

Reliable, real-time feedback methods for assessing human judgment and reasoning;
• Discovering, tracking and categorizing emerging trends, events, and entities;
• Forensics on multimedia and/or social network data;
• Methods for analyzing, reconciling, and managing massive, multimodal, dynamic and diverse data;
• Enhancement of machine learning methods with transparent representations that allow for validation and high confidence in results;
• Methods to generate high resolution geospatial models or 4D geospatial/temporal models from multimodal data;
• Alternative computing regimes and data sharing environments that would facilitate multi-INT processing and asynchronous trusted collaboration;
• Dynamic means to expose and enhance unprocessed data and interim and/or alternative analytic products across domains and/or represent cascade effects of new information on existing models;
• Scalable and adaptable behavioral network science methods to organize information optimally for analytic effectiveness;
• Scalable cross-media anomaly detection and/or discovery methods to identify data and patterns resulting from distinct or novel causal processes;
• Methods for detecting and countering intentionally misleading information;
• Methods to rapidly identify, assess relevancy and reliability of, and/or exploit emerging or alternative sources of information or methods;
• Novel graph analytic techniques for representing, reasoning, and learning from massive or sparsely sampled heterogeneous data;
• Novel approaches to identify and assess persistent or shifting socio-cultural norms and/or effective methods to counter or influence attitudes, behavior or messaging;
• Autonomous agent, machine learning and/or physiological intelligence methods to gather latent or suppressed knowledge.

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.