The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that funds high-risk, high-payoff research to overcome difficult challenges relevant to the United States Intelligence Community. IARPA was given the mandate to conduct cross-community research, target new opportunities and innovations, and generate revolutionary capabilities for national intelligence.
IARPA is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the military. “IARPA does for NSA what DARPA does for the military,” said James A. Lewis, director and senior fellow of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “A lot of their programs are black,” he told CIO Journal, meaning that they’re classified and funded from a classified budget.
“A larger part of IARPA’s portfolio in the last year has been devoted to improving our biosecurity, our ability to detect and prevent biological weapons or disease outbreaks,” said Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, in an interview with FCW.
In August 2018, Dixon IARPA’s deputy director was tapped by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to lead the organization, replacing its current director, Jason Matheny. China’s outsize investment in technology industries and priority research areas like synthetic biology and artificial intelligence may mean top talent that might have remained in the United States is instead lured overseas, according to the newly named director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA), Stacey Dixon. “We’re talking billion-dollar investments,” Dixon said, “and it’s scary, because those are large investments that can really shift what research is accomplished.”
Among IARPA’s four areas of focus are analysis, anticipatory intelligence, collection and computing. Generally, Dixon said, improving analytical capabilities is about making better use of data to, in turn, make better decisions. Anticipatory intelligence is essentially signals-informed forecasting.
The IARPA Mercury Challenge is looking to automatically predict the occurrence of critical events, such as military action and non-violent civil unrest events, and infectious diseases such as MERS in eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
IARPA funds academic and industry research across a broad range of technical areas, including mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, political science, and cognitive psychology. Notable IARPA investments include quantum computing, superconducting computing, and forecasting tournaments.
IARPA’s programs run for three to five years, and once the technical problems are solved, the technology is distributed to relevant agencies. Some of the tech becomes immediately deliverable and operable, but other solutions are only 80 percent complete when they are passed to an agency to finish.
Technology from defense and intelligence research labs has often been criticized for ending up in the “valley of death” between research and commercialization instead of in the field. Matheny said IARPA has those struggles too but tries to test field viability in the lab first to prevent tech from “gathering dust on a shelf.”
Seventy percent of IARPA’s developments make it over the valley of death, Matheny said, which includes programs that failed to meet the agency’s goals but were still better than the current state of the art. “Our partners throughout government still want things that work better than the state of the art even if it didn’t achieve the milestones that it set for the program,” he said.
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