IARPA: Incisive Analysis (BAA-13-02)

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk, high-payoff research. 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. Must demonstrate that their proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to intelligence capabilities. Examples for topics of interest (more topics are detailed in the full call):
- Methods for developing understanding of how knowledge and ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations, and cultures;
- Methods for analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic data;
- Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning;
- Analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data;
- Multidisciplinary approaches to processing noisy audio and speech;
- Development of novel top-down models of visual perception and visual cognition;
- Methods for topological data analysis and inferences of high-dimensional structures from low-dimensional representations;
- Methods for the study of algorithms stated in terms of geometry (computational geometry);
- Methods to make machine learning more useful and automatic;
Funding period of 12 months; no stated monetary funding amounts.
http://www.iarpa.gov/Programs/ia/solicitation_incisive.html