IARPA seeks information regarding the current state of the art (SOTA) in biologically derived materials suitable for controlled transience in propulsion systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). IARPA is interested in understanding how controlled material degradation can be extended beyond structural components to include turbines, engines, motors, and associated propulsion elements.

Of particular interest are approaches that move beyond ultraviolet (UV)-initiated or water (H2O)-initiated transience mechanisms and subsequently enable more diverse triggering modalities that are stable in a range of environmental conditions.  This RFI is issued for planning purposes only and does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or suggest the procurement of any materials, components, or systems.

The proliferation of UAV operations across military, intelligence, and civilian domains has raised growing concerns about the environmental footprint of aerospace materials, particularly in scenarios where systems may be lost. Conventional propulsion components, and their controls, fabricated from persistent materials—metal alloys, engineering plastics, and advanced composites—can remain in ecosystems for decades or centuries. DARPA’s ICARUS (Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems) program pioneered a solution for airframe structures by demonstrating transient materials that maintain operational performance before undergoing controlled degradation, thereby minimizing persistent environmental residue.

The ICARUS approach employed primarily UV-triggered photopolymers that undergo programmable degradation of structural components, establishing proof-of-concept. However, extending these achievements beyond airframes to propulsion systems and their controls reveals critical limitations: propulsion components operate under extreme thermal, mechanical, and chemical stresses; contain a mixture of material types; must maintain structural integrity throughout dynamic mission profiles; require materials compatible with combustion environments or electromagnetic fields; and face significant challenges when UV initiation serves as the primary degradation trigger within enclosed or shielded propulsion assemblies where UV exposure may be limited or absent.

Moreover, there may be operational parameters where natural UV exposure is present.  Environmental conditions that naturally degrade materials—humidity, microbial activity, thermal cycling, oxidation—are often more readily available than UV exposure, suggesting opportunities for bio-derived materials that leverage natural decomposition pathways to control degradation of an airborne system.

Review the IARPA propulsion system materials RFI.

Source: SAM

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This two-year award builds upon the success of Phase 1, where the team made breakthrough discoveries in the study of ionospheric interactions induced by orbital debris. Phase 2 will further refine and operationalize these methods for detecting and characterizing untracked objects through measurements of the plasma wave environment.

“Orion has a long-standing legacy of advancing groundbreaking space science,” said Gregg Burgess, president and general manager, Orion. “Our team’s expertise in space domain awareness, plasma physics, and ionospheric modeling makes us uniquely positioned to deliver this cutting-edge solution for IARPA to further the state of the art in space traffic coordination and orbital debris mitigation.”

The IARPA SINTRA program is among the first to address the critical need for detecting and tracking orbital debris objects smaller than 10 cm, which currently remain outside the persistent tracking capabilities of existing systems. In Phase 1, Orion conducted the first large-scale statistical study highlighting the relationship between space objects and ionospheric perturbations. Building on this foundation, Phase 2 will develop new tools to estimate the characteristics of previously untracked debris objects based on observations of plasma wave activity.

“This contract award highlights Arcfield’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of space exploration,” said Kevin Kelly, chairman and chief executive officer of Arcfield. “Through Orion, we’re developing innovative capabilities that not only advance scientific understanding but deliver practical solutions as our government mission partners seek complete space domain awareness—an increasingly complex challenge.”

The IARPA SINTRA program was first awarded in July of 2023 to investigate the interaction of orbital debris with the space environment to more effectively detect, track and characterize lethal, non-trackable orbital space debris. The Advanced Space performer team is one of a few teams chosen for Phase 2 of the program.

Source: Orion

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The FMS mission is to promote quality of life by ensuring the ODNI facilities are accessible, well-maintained, healthy, clean, comfortable, safe, and resilient.  Liberty Crossing (LX) and Intelligence Community Campus – Bethesda (ICC-B) offer fitness facilities to support the health and wellness of the IC members (staff, detailees, assignees, contractors and others) in their pursuit of a healthy lifestyle by providing well-maintained, clean, comfortable and safe workout spaces to aid in these pursuits.  To deliver exceptional service to the workforce, the ODNI/FMS remains resolute to adapt to workforce and mission needs in a timely and professional manner by offering certified trainers to meet the demands of the workforce.  The ODNI FMS seeks to aid the ODNI workforce with qualified and dedicated, personally tailored solutions for a well-balanced, and agile workforce.

In order to accomplish its mission priorities, the ODNI FMS (hereafter referred to as the “Sponsor”) is focused on promote quality of life by ensuring the ODNI facilities are accessible, well-maintained, healthy, clean, comfortable, safe, and resilient.  Liberty Crossing (LX) and Intelligence Community Campus – Bethesda (ICC-B) (hereafter referred to as “Sponsor’s facilities”) offer fitness facilities to support the health and wellness of the IC members (staff, detailees, assignees, contractors and others) in their pursuit of a healthy lifestyle by providing well-maintained, clean, comfortable and safe workout spaces to aid in these pursuits.

The Government intends to award a single contract encompassing the unclassified work described in the attached SOW (Multiple awards are NOT anticipated).  Exercising of the Option Periods shall depend upon performance during the Base Period and subsequent Option Periods, if any, as well as program goals and the availability of funding.  The Government reserves the right to select for negotiation all, some, or none of the proposals received in response to this solicitation and to make awards without discussions with Offerors. The Government also reserves the right to conduct discussions if determined to be necessary.

Review the ODNI FMS solicitation.

Source: SAM

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On behalf of the OSIE (hereafter referred to as the Sponsor), prospective Respondents are hereby invited to submit solutions against the problem set for the ICDC effort.

The IC has a commercial data acquisition duplication problem and a costly commercial data replication and storage problem. The Government is seeking to award OTs to small businesses, nontraditional defense contractors, or traditional defense contractors if they propose significant involvement from a nontraditional contractor or provide a one-third cost share, with potential for follow-on sole-source sustainment contracts, to manage a commercial data consortium that unifies commercial data acquisition then enables IC users to access and interact with this commercial data in one place on unclassified systems while reducing data copying to classified computer systems. More simply, the Sponsor is seeking two broad skill sets to help solve the problems: 1) consortium data acquisition and management and 2) software creation.

The IC’s fragmented and decentralized acquisition model for Commercially Available Information (CAI) has resulted in siloed acquisitions of commercial data and platform licenses, duplicative purchases where vendors are often selling the same or similar data to many IC customers, bulk data ingest and replication, and limited data sharing. Efforts to partially improve this approach have resulted in exorbitantly priced enterprise contracts for commercial platform licenses that are rarely used.

In addition, the phenomenon of vendors reselling the same or similar data while implementing unique techniques to aggregate data makes it difficult for the IC to determine the differentiated value offered by each vendor. The Sponsor seeks an approach based on repeatable data management plus civil liberties and privacy best practices to help streamline access to CAI for the entire IC and make it available to mission users in a more cohesive, efficient, and cost-effective manner by avoiding duplicative purchases, preventing sunk costs from unused licenses, and reducing overall data storage and compute costs.

The Sponsor seeks a centralized approach to access CAI via three primary options—API query, platform access, and bulk data access—from commercial vendors by establishing a government-funded Data Consortium, which will serve as a clearinghouse for IC data requirements, a single focal point in negotiations with vendors, a compliance vehicle to ensure the IC’s use of the data complies with IC guidance and owners’ terms and conditions, and a mechanism to pool agency funds to achieve economies of scale when pursuing access to targeted commercial data sets.

The Sponsor then seeks a “zero copy” technical solution that prevents duplicative data purchases and reduces data replication and other cloud costs by keeping the data in place on the vendor’s IT to the maximum extent possible.

Review the ODNI ICDC solicitation.

Source: SAM

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The IARPA End-Gen Proposers’ Day meeting will be held on Thursday, 27 February 2025, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST in Arlington, VA, to introduce the End-Gen program to potential proposers and to provide information on technical requirements and program objectives. A virtual attendance option via Webex will also be available.

National security missions need to generate, store, use, transmit, and receive information and data both in secure facilities and “in the wild.” Waveforms are often used as the method for the transmission and reception of data generated in these types of missions. The importance of waveform design is shown by the significant commercial private sector investment to create waveforms that satisfy the population’s need for throughput and reliability of information. The U.S. government has also invested heavily into waveform development for their own mission needs. Due to the broad nature of missions, waveform development can be slow, expensive, and repetitious to meet needs in a changing world. A waveform development and acquisition cycle may take years to field new waveforms, potentially making them obsolete before becoming fully operational. The End-Gen program is interested in optimization frameworks, such as generative AIs, that can immediately create new waveforms to meet mission needs. Two uses of generative waveforms are of interest: generating waveforms in the wild directly or generating waveform protocols in a lab and then transferring to the wild.

REGISTRATION

Participants must register by Monday, 24 February 2025, at noon EST. Same-day registrations will not be accepted. Limited spots are available for in-person attendance and early registration is encouraged. Only three attendees per organization or research group will be permitted to attend in person. The link to register is: https://www.client-meeting.net/end-gen-meeting.

Review the IARPA End-Gen Proposers’ Day information.

Source: SAM

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Most cybersecurity methods involve analyzing tools and methods and fortifying existing defenses. While these techniques have their merits, they miss accounting for perhaps the weakest link in the equation: the constraints on the human adversary.

To address this shortcoming, Charles River Analytics is developing a multi-faceted approach that focuses on human behavior. The tool, Context-driven Interventions through Reasoning about Cyberpsychology Exploitation (CIRCE), is being fueled by a contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The project is part of IARPA’s ReSCIND program, which aims to develop a new set of cyberpsychology-informed defenses that “leverage attacker’s human limitations, such as innate decision-making biases and cognitive vulnerabilities.”

Today, cyber defenses try to understand what kinds of tools adversaries are using. Considerable effort is spent assessing whether an adversary is on a network and, if so, how they got on. But there’s very little work focused on exploiting the human executing the attack.

“Focusing on exploiting human vulnerabilities makes sense,” said Sean Guarino, principal scientist at Charles River Analytics and principal investigator on CIRCE. “Although we live in a time where cyber offense technologies evolve at lightning speed, humans have cognitive constraints that are difficult to overcome. Therefore, defenses that target the human attackers remain relevant for longer periods of time,” Guarino said.

CIRCE relies on the principle of oppositional human factors (OHF), which pinpoints the constraints that attackers face when they’re executing their jobs and makes them worse. The theory is that by degrading the experience, you frustrate the attacker into not executing the job. Dr. Spencer Lynn, senior scientist at Charles River and modeling lead on CIRCE, explained, “When an attacker lands on a network, they have many choices available. We want to be able to steer those choices unbeknownst to them, so that they’re wasting time on the attack.”

Part of the strategy involves misleading human attackers to believe something about the attack surface or defenses that’s not true. For example, if the name of an entry port signals administrative authority, attackers might target it selectively to gain network access, and once they do so, their behavior can be steered in specific ways.

CIRCE is in Phase 1 of the research to explore the possibilities of such OHF-driven manipulation. It focuses on characterizing and experimentally validating attacker cognitive vulnerabilities. If the approach works, “there is a strong commercialization opportunity to develop these into tools that can be inserted into a wide range of different defensive environments,” Guarino says.

CIRCE is a psychology-based method that holds plenty of promise, Guarino said. “Keeping up with technology can be a losing battle because cyber threats move so fast. The human in the attack is the most exploitable point in the attack chain. If we can define good ways to exploit human vulnerabilities, these methods will provide much more effective cyber defense for the long term,” he added.

Source: Charles River Analytics

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The Anonymous Real-Time Speech (ARTS) program will pursue methods to anonymize conversational speech to help safeguard individual speakers’ identities. Research will focus on the English language before transitioning to other spoken languages.

“An individual’s way of speaking is an incredibly unique trait that can serve as a powerful identifier,” said Dr. Mark Becker, ARTS Program Manager. “With the rise of biometric identification tools, our research seeks to add a critical layer of protection for intelligence officers who are carrying out some of the Intelligence Community’s most sensitive missions.”

Through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement, IARPA awarded ARTS research contracts to address the full range of research objectives to the following teams:

• Galois, Inc.
• Honeywell
• Johns Hopkins University
• SRI International

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Sandia National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will perform test and evaluation work for the program.

The ARTS program is scheduled to run for 36 months.

Source: ODNI

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Signature Science and its teammates from Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, Georgetown University, and the University of Texas at Austin reached several key milestones toward this goal in Phase 1. The team’s research centered around the application of RNA sequencing techniques and LC-MS/MS-based metabolomics and lipidomics to identify radiation-responsive genes from a variety of sample types. The team developed a novel biomarker discovery pipeline, scalable sample analysis workflows, and biodosimetry model evaluation tools. Together, these elements contribute to more rapid signature selection, enabling researchers to process new datasets in a matter of a few hours.

In Phase 2, Signature Science will optimize the methods developed in Phase 1 across several metrics. The team will work to detect biomarkers associated with lower doses of radiation exposure, and pinpoint details related to the date and type of radiation exposure with higher accuracy. Simultaneously, there will be a focus on increasing reproducibility and confidence in analyses. To this end, Signature Science will develop statistical and computational methods to decrease the effect of batch-to-batch variability on endpoint prediction.

“We are proud to have been among the Phase 1 performers selected to advance to Phase 2,” said co-principal investigator Myles Gardner. “IARPA consistently poses some of the most difficult, complicated questions to the scientific community, and we are looking forward to continuing our work to provide them with a solution to this one.” Dr. Gardner serves as co-principal investigator for Signature Science alongside Dr. Amrita Cheema of Georgetown University.

Source: Signature Science

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National security missions need to generate, store, use, transmit, and receive information and data in secure facilities and “in the wild.” Confidence in data security remains high for the former, but presents challenges for the latter, where less control exists. The SCISRS program seeks to develop smart radio techniques to automatically detect and characterize radio frequency (RF) anomalies that may indicate a compromise of secure data in complex, “in the wild” RF environments.

Specific types of anomalies include low probability of intercept signals, altered or mimicked signals, and abnormal unintended emissions. In Phases 1 and 2, EXP developed and rigorously tested machine learning-based algorithms on a custom-built, state-of-the-art RF testbed to detect and characterize low probability of intercept, altered, and mimicked signals. In Phase 3, EXP will continue to enhance these algorithms with an additional focus on developing machine learning solutions for detecting anomalous emanations typically emitted unintentionally by electronic devices (e.g., monitors, keyboards), thereby transmitting potentially secure information by mistake and placing missions and lives at risk.

“When it comes to protecting sensitive and secure data from exfiltration, we face unrelenting pressure from our adversaries. We must be perfect in our defense against innumerable threats, while they only require a single breach to achieve success,” said Marc Harlacher, EXP’s president and CEO. “To stay a step ahead, we need highly intelligent solutions that can process and analyze massive amounts of information in near-real-time and learn and adapt with the same dexterity and agility. We are combining our RF and machine learning expertise to help IARPA bring those solutions from concept to reality.”

Source: Expedition Technology

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IARPA seeks information regarding methodologies capable of arbitrary generation of communication waveforms in a wide variety of propagation media. Point-to-point communications are at the heart of innumerable mission spaces spanning a host of different objectives. At present, most communications channels make use of fixed waveforms designed to meet the demands of the “average” propagation media and the available communication equipment. The static nature of these waveforms can be disadvantageous to the stability of the communication channel given spatial-temporal variations in the propagation media. Therefore, communications frameworks that can generate on-demand waveforms are especially attractive when the current time and cost of developing new waveforms (1), to meet fluid mission needs, is prohibitively high.

This RFI seeks methodologies that, when coupled with appropriate communications hardware, show the potential to achieve on-demand waveforms that meet the required human objectives and limitations of the propagation medium. Such an approach could result in endless generative (End-Gen) waveforms that automatically optimize the communications channel without the constraints of human-generated communications protocols. End-Gen nodes, therefore, will contain frameworks which produce generative waveforms that satisfy any generic mission objective function.

End-Gen nodes that create End-Gen waveforms are of keen interest as they allow for the rapid deployment of waveforms to match the real-time change in mission needs. Specifically, IARPA is interested in demonstrating three parts of any End-Gen paradigm: 1) the processing framework needed to generate meaningful communications links, 2) the hardware SWaP (size, weight, and power) required to run the framework, and 3) the sensors/transducers needed to couple framework outputs to the propagation medium.

Review the End-Gen Waveforms RFI.

Source: SAM

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