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.

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.

Health threats often evolve more quickly than health solutions. Despite ongoing research in the government and the biopharmaceutical industry to identify new therapies, the Department of Defense currently lacks the tools to address the full spectrum of chemical, biological, and disease threats that could impact the readiness of U.S. forces. DARPA created the Folded Non-Natural Polymers with Biological Function program (Fold F(x)) to give DoD medical researchers new tools to develop medicines, sensors, and diagnostics using new libraries of synthetic polymers.

The photon is a fundamental carrier of information, possessing numerous information carrying degrees of freedom including frequency, phase, arrival time, polarization, orbital angular momentum, linear momentum, entanglement, etc. Because optical photons are approximately a million times more costly (i.e., energetic) than their radio frequency counterparts, photons are a valuable resource for many military applications ranging from communications systems to visible and infrared sensing platforms.