Office of Incisive Analysis Office Wide – Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) IARPA-BAA-14-02
BAA Release Date: March 10, 2014
IARPA-BAA-14-02 with all Supporting Documents
From the webpage:
Synopsis
IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries. This BAA solicits abstracts/proposals for Incisive Analysis.
IA focuses on maximizing insights from the massive, disparate, unreliable and dynamic data that are – or could be – available to analysts, in a timely manner. We are pursuing new sources of information from existing and novel data, and developing innovative techniques that can be utilized in the processes of analysis. IA programs are in diverse technical disciplines, but have common features: (a) Create technologies that can earn the trust of the analyst user by providing the reasoning for results; (b) Address data uncertainty and provenance explicitly.
The following topics (in no particular order) are of interest to IA:
- Methods for estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk;
- Methods for understanding the process of analysis and potential impacts of technology;
- Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning;
- Multidisciplinary approaches to processing noisy audio and speech;
- Methods and approaches to quantifiable representations of uncertainty simultaneously accounting for multiple types of uncertainty;
- Discovering, tracking and sorting emerging events and participating entities found in reports;
- Accelerated system development via machine learning;
- Testable methods for identifying individuals’ intentions;
- Methods for developing understanding of how knowledge and ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations, and cultures;
- Methods for analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic data;
- Methods to construct and evaluate speech recognition systems in languages without a formalized orthography;
- Multidisciplinary approaches to assessing linguistic data sets;
- Mechanisms for detecting intentionally falsified representations of events and/or personas;
- Methods for understanding and managing massive, dynamic data in images, video, and speech;
- Analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data;
- Methods to make machine learning more useful and automatic;
- 4D geospatial/temporal representations to facilitate change detection and analysis;
- Novel approaches for mobile augmented reality applied to analysis and collection;
- Methods for assessments of relevancy and reliability of new data;
- Novel approaches to data and knowledge management facilitating discovery, retrieval and manipulation of large volumes of information to provide greater access to interim analytic and processing products.
This announcement seeks research ideas for topics that are not addressed by emerging or ongoing IARPA programs or other published IARPA solicitations. It is primarily, but not solely, intended for early stage research that may lead to larger, focused programs through a separate BAA in the future, so periods of performance generally will not exceed 12 months.
Offerors should demonstrate that their proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to intelligence capabilities. Research that primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice is specifically excluded.
Contracting Office Address:
Office of Incisive Analysis
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Office of the Director of National Intelligence
ATTN: IARPA-BAA-14-02
Washington, DC 20511
Fax: 301-851-7673Primary Point of Contact:
dni-iarpa-baa-14-02@iarpa.gov
The “topics … of interest” that caught my eye for topic maps are:
- Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning;
- Discovering, tracking and sorting emerging events and participating entities found in reports;
- Methods for developing understanding of how knowledge and ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations, and cultures;
- Methods for analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic data;
- Novel approaches to data and knowledge management facilitating discovery, retrieval and manipulation of large volumes of information to provide greater access to interim analytic and processing products.
Thinking capturing the insights of users as they use and add content to a topic map as “evolutionary change.”
Others?