The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) is soliciting research proposals related to information technology (IT) and cyber capabilities, the office said in a broad agency announcement (BAA) released Aug. 3.
Looking to fund research in the office’s “thrust areas,” DARPA is inviting proposals concerning exponential improvements in computing power, network bandwidth, and storage density; pervasive sensing and measurement technologies; and technologies that enable computing systems to understand human communication, derive information in diverse media, and respond intelligently to unforeseen events.
Such technologies in military systems “will enable warfighters to make better decisions in complex, time-critical, battlefield environments; intelligence analysts to make sense of massive, incomplete, and contradictory information and autonomous systems to operate with high degrees of assurance,” DARPA said in the solicitation posted to FedBizOpps.
I2O also seeks to change the cybersecurity paradigm of discovering vulnerabilities, deploying patches then repeating “through the creation of software that is inherently resilient to attack and computing architectures that can be rapidly restored following an attack.”
DARPA intends to accomplish this goal by supporting research involving formal methods, software diversity, transparency/causality/information flow tracking, and automated cyber response.
The office’s research spans military systems, embedded systems, critical infrastructure, industrial systems, vehicular systems, the Internet of Things, and enterprise networks, DARPA said.
In addition to computing research, I2O is also interested in privacy-preserving technologies “to ensure that the collective security benefits of big data do not come at the expense of personal privacy, and to protect the proprietary and sensitive information of enterprise and coalition partners,” the announcement said.
DARPA anticipated funding limited number of proposals and funding levels will depend on the quality of the proposals and fund availability.