Fundamental Physical Science

Machine learning has shown remarkable success across many application areas in recent years, leveraging advances in computing power and the availability of large sets of training data. It provides a tremendous opportunity to deploy data-driven systems in more complex and interactive tasks including personalized autonomy, agile robotics, self-driving vehicles, and smart cities. Despite dramatic progress, the machine learning community still lacks an understanding of the trade-offs and mathematical limitations of related technologies for a given domain, problem, or dataset.

DARPA's Defense Sciences Office is sponsoring a Proposers Day to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program. The Proposers Day will be held on March 22, 2016 at the Westin Arlington Gateway (801 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22203). The event will be webcast for those who would like to participate remotely. Advance registration is required both for attending the Proposers Day in person and for viewing the webcast.

DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office is hosting a Proposers Day webinar to provide information to potential applicants on the structure and objectives of the Young Faculty Awards (YFA) program in anticipation of a forthcoming YFA research announcement. The YFA program aims to identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions in academia and equivalent positions at non-profit research institutions, and expose them to Department of Defense (DoD) and National Security challenges and needs.

Destroying bulk stores of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) and organic precursors is a significant challenge for the international community. Today, for example, there are no approaches that exploit chemistries that are truly agnostic in terms of the agents that can be processed. In addition, current approaches require transport of agents from the storage site to a neutralization site. Ensuring safe transport of the agent can add significant cost and time to the process.

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.