The Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare (BLADE) program is developing the capability to counter new and dynamic wireless communication threats in tactical environments. BLADE is enabling a shift from today's manual-intensive lab-based countermeasure development approach to an adaptive, in-the-field systems approach. The program will achieve this by developing novel machine-learning algorithms and techniques that can rapidly detect and characterize new radio threats, dynamically synthesize new countermeasures, and provide accurate battle damage assessment based on over-the-air observable changes in the threat. More
|
Some of the systems that matter most to the Defense Department are very complicated. Ecosystems, brains and economic and social systems have many parts and processes, but they are studied piecewise, and their literatures and data are fragmented, distributed and inconsistent. It is difficult to build complete, explanatory models of complicated systems, and so effects in these systems that are brought about by many interacting factors are poorly understood. More
|
Military readiness and national security depend on the health and wellbeing of military servicemembers. DoD’s cumulative investment in personnel comprises the second-largest share of the total defense budget. As such, DoD seeks advances in healthcare to ensure warfighters can operate at peak performance. In this context, the Biochronicity program will explore the role of time in biological functions in pursuit of breakthroughs in managing the effects of time on human physiology. More
|
The Biological Control program seeks to build new capabilities for the control of biological systems across scales—from nanometers to centimeters, seconds to weeks, and biomolecules to populations of organisms—using embedded controllers made of biological parts to program system-level behavior. More
|
The Biological Robustness in Complex Settings (BRICS) program seeks to develop the fundamental understanding and component technologies needed to engineer biosystems that function reliably in changing environments. A long-term goal is to enable the safe transition of synthetic biological systems from well-defined laboratory environments into more complex settings where they can achieve greater biomedical, industrial, and strategic potential. More
|
Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have inherent operational and tactical advantages such as stealth and surprise. UUV size, weight and volume are constrained by the handling, launch and recovery systems on their host platforms, however, and UUV range is limited by the amount of energy available for propulsion and the power required for a given underwater speed. Current state-of-the-art energy sources are limited by safety and certification requirements for host platforms. More
|
How can society responsibly reap the benefits of big data while protecting individual privacy? More
|
Expanded global access to diverse means of communication is resulting in more information being produced in more languages more quickly than ever before. The volume of information encountered by DoD, the speed at which it arrives, and the diversity of languages and media through which it is communicated make identifying and acting on relevant information a serious challenge. At the same time, there is a need to communicate with non-English-speaking local populations of foreign countries, but it is at present costly and difficult for DoD to do so. More
|