DARPA Archives

Social networking? Micro-blogging? News aggregation? Twitter has seen many uses for defense IT and national security professionals since the service was rolled out in 2006, but one use has been flying under the proverbial radar: Comedy.

Fake twitter accounts have been in the news before, with a fake Rahm Emmanuel feed gaining popularity as a way to tell a satirical, fantastical story in 140-character segments. Other fake accounts have also gained acclaim, including those lampooning pro football players and embattled politicians.

Now, a major weapon system is having its day in the Twitter comedy sun: The unmanned aerial vehicle. On the Drunk Predator Drone twitter feed, the author makes jokes about the Defense Department, current politics and even current events.

Similarly, the Hipster UAV feed combines the UAV jokes with the somewhat stale humor of making fun of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn set.

The authors of the feeds know their stuff, which makes the content all the more clever. In each, the specificity of the subject matter is more than the run-of-the-mill fake accounts.

Like, say, Fake Jack Bauer.

Ahh, computers keep getting faster and smarter, but thank goodness they still don't match up to the power of the human brain -- or I'd be out of work.

But what if someone could figure out how to come up with the direct brain-machine interface that harnesses the power of that organ to tools such as robot limbs?

That was the theme of a 2004 project the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency worked on in 2004, the details of which were released on Wednesday by the Defense Department's FOIA website.

DARPA, based on this report, managed to harness the power of a rat's brain to a machine interface, but so far has not managed to turn the robo-rat into a robo-writer. For a while, at least, I have job security.

Wired's Danger Room reports that Peter Lee, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's "leading advocate for crowdsourcing and other ways of tapping new talent is leaving to join Microsoft." Lee, former head of Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, was at DARPA for only a year. He developed DARPA's Transformative Apps program.

Danger Room also notes that Lee is "the third director of DARPA's seven major offices to leave since Regina Dugan took over the agency in June 2009."

Those smart techie folks at Carnegie Mellon University have put together a program aimed at boosting young students' interest in computer science with the hopes that they can convince more teenagers to enter scientific and technological careers.

The school launched on Tuesday an educational initiative, with $7 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop tools that allow middle and high school students to interact with robots to learn about computer science, science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- you know, CS-STEM. Carnegie Mellon officials hope the initiative can reverse what it calls "a significant national decline in the number of college students majoring in" the sciences.

The program is called Fostering Innovation through Robotics Exploration, or FIRE, as in fire up your interest in computer science. It will support the creation of programs such as "game-like virtual worlds where robot programs can be tested, as well as computerized tutors that teach mathematics and computer science in the context of robotics," according to a press release.

"The idea is that these programs must be rigorous, but fun -- what we call 'hard fun,'" said Robin Shoop, director of FIRE and of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy, an international leader in the development of K-12 robotic education curriculum. "Robots provide a great teaching tool. Kids like robots and are innately curious about how they work and how they make decisions. Finding answers to their questions is fun, but technically challenging, and that makes robotics uniquely suited to teaching students computer science, engineering and mathematics."

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Army both kicked off projects to develop applications for mobile gadgets and gismos in March. The House Armed Services Committee strongly favors the Apps for the Army project over DARPA's Transformative Apps program.

The House committee said in its report on the fiscal 2011 Defense Department Appropriations bill that it favored the Apps for the Army competition backed by Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army's chief information officer, because he has "day-to-day experience supporting the warfighting community."

The report said this means Sorenson has "a closer understanding of the warfighter's needs and requirements" compared to DARPA. The report also criticized DARPA for not ensuring its program would not conflict with the Army project.

Entries in the Apps for the Army competition, which will award $30,000 in cash prizes, closed May 15. Margaret McBride, Sorenson's spokeswoman, said 141 soldiers and Army civilians registered in teams or as individuals to participate in the application development challenge.

Apps submitted included 17 for Google Android phones, 16 for the Apple iPhone, and seven for the gizmo loved by the military, the Blackberry.

McBride said the Army will put the entries through a security review and then they will go to the judges. Winners will be announced at the , which runs from August 3-5 in Tampa.

How bad is the threat of an insider attack against military information systems?

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency answers that question in stark terms in its request for industry help to counter insider electronic moles:

Trusted insiders ... are targeting the U.S. information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction. [Emphasis included.]

National Counterintelligence Strategy of the United States of America (2008).

DARPA says protecting information systems against bad insider actors is often difficult
because the defenses must be perfect and comprehensive, while the attacker needs to find only one flaw.

That's why the agency said it has kicked off a project called Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination, which we all know stands for SMITE, a lovely play on words for fighting back against an enemy.

Detecting insider threats, DARPA said, remains a challenge because it requires unearthing subtle indicators of malicious behavior buried in enormous observational data of no immediate relevance, or zeroing in on one key signal out of a lot of background noise.

One way to detect insider threats is to focus on deceptive behavior, which is characteristic of malicious intent - which, by the way, leads to the problem of assigning intent to observed behaviors.

But DARPA added that in both the real and virtual world, it is very difficult to do anything without leaving some evidence behind. Attempts to conceal or remove evidence generally create new evidence that, if detected, could be a strong indication of the perpetrator's intent.

Forensic-like techniques can be used to find clues, gather and evaluate evidence and combine them deductively, and DARPA says it needs industry help in developing these techniques.

The agency wants vendors to provide it with white papers that include, but are not limited to, techniques to derive information about the relationship between deductions, the likely intent of inferred actions and suggestions about what evidence might mean and then dynamically forecast context-dependent behaviors.

The agency also would like ideas on how to use information sensors and algorithms to help it determine the scale and complexity of current and projected insider threats and novel approaches based on social behavioral science.

Anyone interested in tackling this challenge needs to respond to DARPA by May 26.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has kicked off a research project to develop systems imbued with something that only exists in the animal kingdom: visual intelligence. The name of the project? The Mind's Eye.

Humans, DARPA says, can perform a range of visual tasks with ease, such as discerning the difference between objects and the scenes around them, well as the fine movements of the objects. Humans also possess a powerful ability to manipulate mentally imagined scenes to solve problems.

DARPA said it wants to develop a smart camera that possess the same abilities, which it figures would fit well on a range of surveillance gadgets, and wants to install the gizmo on a portable unmanned ground vehicle.

The Army plans to field portable, unmanned ground vehicles to all its infantry brigades as part of its modernization plans, but today soldiers operate them with controllers much like those used for Xbox video games.

Anyone with experience in cognitive systems, machine vision and related fields interested in visual intelligence development should show up at 1 pm on April 20 for the Mind's Eye industry day at the Washington Marriott in Washington.

You must register online by April 16.