Critical & Emerging Technologies

Military commanders require means for detecting and anticipating long-term strategic instability. They have to get ahead and stay ahead of conflicts, whether those conflicts are within nation states, between nation states, and/or between non-nation states. In establishing or maintaining security in a region, cooperation and planning by the regional combatant …

Metallic glasses are new type of glass that are  extremely strong, hard, and resistant to wear and corrosion, all of which make them good potential candidates for engineering uses, including electronics casings, and medical uses such as surgical pins and stents. Metallic glass can withstand heavy impacts without deforming – even when …

As computing devices become more pervasive, the software systems that control them have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated. Consequently, despite the tremendous resources devoted to making software more robust and resilient, ensuring that programs are correct—especially at scale—remains a difficult and challenging endeavor. Unfortunately, uncaught errors triggered during program …

Our society is highly connected through various digital services. However, much of the information we exchange and process is of an analogue nature in its origin. Analogue-to-digital conversion is thus already an integral part of our modern digital society. Digital signal processing is a powerful technique for storing, analysing and …

Our military forces are becoming increasingly dependent on current and reliable video data for the conduct of day-to-day operations. Our deployed forces are faced with many challenges to provide real-time situational awareness across their expansive areas of responsibility (AOR). Among the highest ISR requirements of our military services is the …

The modern battlespace is an irregular, against a tech-enabled enemy, and within urban environments and/or complex terrain. Traditional communications infrastructure like cell phone towers are centralized therefore vulnerable to single point failures such as physical damage to their central server, or compromised by a cyber-attack. During disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis …

DARPA in recent years has focused heavily on the need to disaggregate complex military systems and to evolve a portfolio of “system-of-systems” architectures to better manage national security applications and improve the survivability and mission success of military platforms. A core remaining challenge, however, has been the lack of sophisticated …

We now live in a Silicon Age; Solid-state electronics has replaced vacuum tubes in radios, computers and other electronic and radio frequency gadgetry.  Still vacuum electronic devices, have not become extinct, the magnetron that made radar possible in the first half of the 20th century is still employed in microwave …

The ACES program aims to develop portable, battery‐powered atomic clocks with stability, repeatability, and environmental sensitivity approaching that of laboratory‐grade cesium beam frequency standards. “The history of human knowledge is reflected in our clock technology,” says Robert Lutwak, program manager for the agency’s Atomic Clocks with Enhanced Stability (ACES) project. …