IARPA Office of Smart Collection extends BAA closing date

By Loren Blinde March 9, 2015

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On March 10, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) announced that it was extending the response date for the Office of Smart Collection’s office-wide broad agency announcement (BAA). Potential funding recipients should note that responses are now due April 10.

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 Smart Collection.

The mission of the Office of Smart Collection is to dramatically improve the value of collected data from all sources. The Office seeks to achieve this goal by, among other activities, developing new sensor and transmission technologies, new collection techniques that more precisely target desired information, and means for collecting information from previously inaccessible sources. In addition, the Office pursues new mechanisms for combining information gathered from multiple sources to enhance the quality, reliability, and utility of collected information.

In general, this BAA solicits:
• Innovative methods or tools for identifying and/or creating novel sources of new information;
• Sensor technologies that dramatically improve the reach, sensitivity, size, weight, power and duration for collection of broad signal or signature types;
• Methods for combining different measures and/or sensors to improve performance and accuracy of systems;
• Approaches for assessing and quantifying the ecological-validity of behavioral, neuro- and social science research;
• Innovative approaches to gain access to denied environments;
• Secure communication to and from collection points;
• Tagging, Tracking, and Location (TTL) techniques;
• Electrically small antennas and other advanced radio frequency (RF) concepts;
• Agile architectures that intelligently distill useful information at the collector;
• Innovative means and methods to ensure the veracity of data collected from a variety of sources;
• Automated methods for sensor data fusion without predefined interface descriptions;
• Approaches to enable signal collection systems to conduct more effective targeted information acquisition rather than bulk collection; and
• Tools to identify and mask signal streams and records that contain personal information to avoid unauthorized collection and dissemination.

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.