Mercury Registration Deadline: February 17, 2015.
From the post:
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the Mercury Program on March 5, in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation in support of the program. The Conference will be held from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM EST in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The purpose of the conference will be to provide introductory information on Mercury and the research problems that the program aims to address, to respond to questions from potential proposers, and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities and identify potential team partners.
Program Description and Goals
Past research has found that publicly available data can be used to accurately forecast events such as political crises and disease outbreaks. However, in many cases, relevant data are not available, have significant lag times, or lack accuracy. Little research has examined whether data from foreign Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) can be used to improve forecasting accuracy in these cases.
The Mercury Program seeks to develop methods for continuous, automated analysis of SIGINT in order to anticipate and/or detect political crises, disease outbreaks, terrorist activity, and military actions. Anticipated innovations include: development of empirically driven sociological models for population-level behavior change in anticipation of, and response to, these events; processing and analysis of streaming data that represent those population behavior changes; development of data extraction techniques that focus on volume, rather than depth, by identifying shallow features of streaming SIGINT data that correlate with events; and development of models to generate probabilistic forecasts of future events. Successful proposers will combine cutting-edge research with the ability to develop robust forecasting capabilities from SIGINT data.
Mercury will not fund research on U.S. events, or on the identification or movement of specific individuals, and will only leverage existing foreign SIGINT data for research purposes.
The Mercury Program will consist of both unclassified and classified research activities and expects to draw upon the strengths of academia and industry through collaborative teaming. It is anticipated that teams will be multidisciplinary, and might include social scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, content extraction experts, information theorists, and SIGINT subject matter experts with applied experience in the U.S. SIGINT System.
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Attendees must register no later than 6:00 pm EST, February 27, 2015 at http://events.SignUp4.com/MercuryPDRegistration_March2015. Directions to the conference facility and other materials will be provided upon registration. No walk-in registrations will be allowed.
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I might be interested if you can hide me under a third or fourth level sub-contractor. 😉
Seriously, it isn’t that I despair of the legitimate missions of intelligence agencies but I do despise waste on ways known to not work. Government funding, even unlimited funding, isn’t going to magically confer the correct semantics on data or enable analysts to meaningfully share their work products across domains.
You would think going on fourteen (14) years post-9/11 and not being one step closer to preventing a similar event, that would be a “wake-up” call to someone. If not in the U.S. intelligence community, perhaps in intelligence communities who tire of aping the U.S. community with no better results.