Harnessing Complexity

Novel methods, tools, and approaches to better understand social systems and dynamics in a national security context

In early September, DARPA hosted Wait, What? A Future Technology Forum in St. Louis. There, 1400 people gathered for a national discussion and showcase of new ideas and advances in the technoscape, among them optical techniques for seeing around corners and neural interfaces that allow people with paralysis to control a prosthetic limb by thought alone. At the forum, DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO) ran a pair of breakout sessions titled Science, Disrupted: Beyond the Limits of Intuition, Computation and Measurement, with the hope of learning from attendees what they imagine could throttle up science into an even more powerful engine of discovery and technology than it is now.

Advanced materials are increasingly embodying counterintuitive properties, such as extreme strength and super lightness, while additive manufacturing and other new technologies are vastly improving the ability to fashion these novel materials into shapes that would previously have been extremely costly or even impossible to create. Generating new designs that fully exploit these properties, however, has proven extremely challenging.

DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) is hosting a Proposers Day to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the upcoming Data-Driven Discovery of Models program. The program aims to develop semi-automated model discovery systems that enable non-expert users (i.e., users with subject matter expertise but no data science background) to create empirical models of real, complex processes. DARPA believes such a capability would increase the productivity of data scientists, and enable many more users to make predictions from data.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a Proposers Day to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the TRAnsformative DESign (TRADES) program. The Proposers Day will be held on Friday, May 13, 2016 from 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM (EDT) at the Executive Conference Center (4075 Wilson Blvd. Suite 350 Arlington, VA 22203).