Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity

Mission

IARPA characterizes its mission as follows:

Contents

• unbiasing your biases by intelligence advanced research projects activity iarpa
• Mission
• History
• Approach
• Research fields
• Research Programs
• Past research
• Current research
• Directors
• References

To envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage.

History

In 1958, the first Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, was created in response to an unanticipated surprise—the Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The ARPA model was designed to anticipate and pre-empt technological surprise. As then-Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said, "I want an agency that makes sure no important thing remains undone because it doesn’t fit somebody's mission." The ARPA model has been characterized by ambitious technical goals, competitively awarded research led by term-limited staff, and independent testing and evaluation.

Authorized by the ODNI in 2006, IARPA was modeled after DARPA but focused on national intelligence needs, rather than military needs. The agency was a consolidation of the National Security Agency's Disruptive Technology Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's National Technology Alliance, and the Central Intelligence Agency's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. IARPA operations began on October 1, 2007. Its headquarters, a new building in M Square, the University of Maryland's research park in Riverdale Park, Maryland, was dedicated in April 2009.

IARPA's quantum computing research was named Science magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010. In 2015, IARPA was named to lead foundational research and development in the National Strategic Computing Initiative. IARPA is also a part of other White House science and technology efforts, including the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing. In 2013, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks called IARPA "one of the government's most creative agencies."

Approach

IARPA invests in multi-year research programs, in which academic and industry teams compete to solve a well-defined set of technical problems, regularly scored on a shared set of metrics and milestones. Each program is led by an IARPA Program Manager (PM) who is a term-limited Government employee. IARPA programs are meant to enable researchers to pursue ideas that are potentially disruptive to the status quo.

Most IARPA research is unclassified and openly published. Current director Jason Matheny has stated the agency's goals of openness and external engagement to draw in expertise from academia and industry, or even individuals who "might be working in their basement on some data-science project and might have an idea for how to solve an important problem". IARPA transfers successful research results and technologies to other government agencies.

Research fields

IARPA is known for its programs to fund research into anticipatory intelligence, using data science to make predictions about future events ranging from the political elections to disease outbreaks to cyberattacks, some of which focus on open-source intelligence. IARPA has pursued these objectives not only through traditional funding programs but also through tournaments and prizes. c is an example of one such program. Other projects involve analysis of images or video that lacks metadata by directly analyzing the media's content itself. Examples given by IARPA include determining the location of an image by analyzing features such as placement of trees or a mountain skyline, or determining whether a video is of a baseball game or a traffic jam. Another program focuses on developing speech recognition tools that can transcribe arbitrary languages.

IARPA is also involved in high-performance computing and alternative computing methods. In 2015, IARPA was named as one of two foundational research and development agencies in the National Strategic Computing Initiative, with the specific charge of "future computing paradigms offering an alternative to standard semiconductor computing technologies". One such approach is cryogenic superconducting computing, which seeks to use superconductors such as niobium rather than semiconductors to reduce the energy consumption of future exascale supercomputers.

Several programs at IARPA focus on quantum computing and neuroscience. IARPA is a major funder of quantum computing research due to its applications in quantum cryptography. As of 2009, IARPA was said to provide a large portion of quantum computing funding resources in the United States. Quantum computing research funded by IARPA was named Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010, and physicist David Wineland was a winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics for quantum computing research funded by IARPA. IARPA is also involved in neuromorphic computation efforts as part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative and the National Nanotechnology Initiative's Grand Challenge for Future Computing. IARPA's MICrONS project seeks to reverse engineer one cubic millimiter of brain tissue and use insights from its study to improve machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Research Programs

Below is some of the past and current research programs of IARPA.

Past research

Current research

Directors