Fundamental Physical Science

DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a two-day Proposers Day, June 22-23, to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the DSO Office-wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): http://go.usa.gov/cStaQ. Attendees may register to attend in person or via webinar.

It’s not easy to put the intelligence in artificial intelligence. Current machine learning techniques generally rely on huge amounts of training data, vast computational resources, and a time-consuming trial and error methodology. Even then, the process typically results in learned concepts that aren’t easily generalized to solve related problems or that can’t be leveraged to learn more complex concepts. The process of advancing machine learning could no doubt go more efficiently—but how much so?

Soldiers often operate in extreme environments, where they may be exposed to the elements for long periods of time. Standard equipment such as electronics and armor are designed to withstand such stresses, but that is not true for the contents of a medic’s bag. Most medicines, including essential biotherapeutics such as insulin, degrade rapidly when stored outside of specified temperature, humidity, and light conditions. DARPA’s Fold F(x) program aims to develop new classes of rugged, shelf-stable medicines based on non-natural, synthetic polymers that can better withstand extreme conditions in the field. The Agency will hold a workshop next week to describe recent successes and discuss applications with potential collaborators.

DARPA-supported researchers have developed a new approach for synthesizing ultrathin materials at room temperature—a breakthrough over industrial approaches that have demanded temperatures of 800 °C or more. The advance opens a path to creating a host of previously unattainable thin-film microelectronics, whose production by conventional methods has been impossible because many components lose their critical functions when subjected to high temperatures.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a two-day Proposers Day event to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the DSO Office-wide Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): http://go.usa.gov/cStaQ. The event will be held at the DARPA, 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, VA 22203 on June 22-23, 2016, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Advance registration is required; attendees may attend in person or participate via webinar.