Solicitations - OFFICE OF INCISIVE ANALYSIS

Office of Incisive Analysis Office Wide - Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)

IARPA-BAA-12-01
BAA Release Date: December 02, 2011
Proposal Due Date: No later than November 30, 2012
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Description Additional Information

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 research is parsed among three Offices: Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe & Secure Operations. This BAA solicits abstracts/proposals for the Office of Incisive Analysis (IA).

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 are of interest to IA:

  • Understanding how knowledge and ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations, and cultures
  • Analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic data
  • Multidisciplinary approaches to assessing linguistic data sets
  • Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning
  • Extraction and representation of the information in non-technical structured documents, including legal and regulatory
  • Extraction and representation of the information in the non-textual contents of documents, including figures, diagrams, and tables
  • Understanding and managing massive, dynamic data
  • Effective analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data
  • Assessing relevancy of new data
  • Processing noisy audio and speech
  • Top-down models of visual perception and visual cognition
  • Analysis of significant societal events
  • Estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk
  • Augmented reality applied to analysis
  • Research that explores innovative approaches for the analysis and understanding of massive, publicly available, fine-grained financial investment transaction data, as outlined in the IARPA Markets Analysis and Testing of Contextual Hypotheses Enhancement System (MATCHES) Proposers' Day briefing (http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_matches.html). Potential research topics include: reliable forensic and/or predictive theory-based indicators of market behaviors and world events; interactive exploration of massive data; and hypothesis-driven analysis. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are of interest. The proposal should identify the data required by the research (see BAA Section 3.4.8 Data Sources) and the potential cost and acquisition strategy for the researcher to get access to the data. All required data should be publicly available. IARPA may choose to acquire data on behalf of performers.

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 in the future, so periods of performance will generally 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 the Director of National Intelligence
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Washington, District of Columbia 20511
United States

Primary Point of Contact:
dni-iarpa-baa-12-01@ugov.gov