DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) - TOPIC #8 (relevant to the MSM Consortium)
8. Bio-inspired modeling of resilience and efficiency in complex systems
Collective behavior in biological systems, such as cooperation and competition, spans the activities of a wide variety of species (bacteria, insects, fish, birds, mammals). These species demonstrate not only coordinated behavior, but also “sociality” - the result of an evolutionary process that selected species that coped with complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments by balancing group success and individual survival.
Biological systems are already a source of inspiration for computer science - slime molds efficiently compute NP-hard problems; new imaging techniques that reveal the neuronal structures of systems like Drosophila have led to machine learning algorithms that out-perform human-engineered approaches. However, the collective, or “social” behavior of biological systems remains relatively unexplored, despite new opportunities to observe and analyze .
This topic explores this utility by focusing on the interaction between two tractable dimensions – physical movement (e.g., transportation of food, responding to a threat) and communication. Successful proposals will apply current and next-generation technologies for sensing, learning, and computationally model individual entities (e.g., modeling ant response to alarm signals; monitoring and representing the behavior economics of bacteria) to better understand and exploit the potential of socio-biological systems. The effort must address one or both of the following areas: (1) Sensing and sensor-processing of socio-biological systems (e.g., achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in the number of socio-biological entities that can be accurately and precisely tracked; automatically identify and analyze behavioral features; demonstrate and quantify results across at least two species); (2) Computational modeling of socio-biological systems (e.g., derive and/or learn algorithms, models, and causal mechanisms; validate these across at least two species; demonstrate improvements over existing theories of complex system behavior). Across both objectives, an evaluation of the application to national security contexts is required. Critically, any approach must include a plan to quantitatively describe and demonstrate the improvements over the state of the art obtained through the study of socio-biological systems
Federal Agency Name: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office (DSO)
• Funding Opportunity Title: Young Faculty Award (YFA)
• Announcement Type: Initial Announcement
• Funding Opportunity Number: DARPA-RA-18-02
• Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) Number(s): 12.910 Research and Technology Development
• Dates (All times listed herein are Eastern Time)
o Posting Date: August 9, 2018
o Executive Summary Due Date: September 10, 2018, 4:00 p.m.
o FAQ Submission Deadline: November 8, 2018, 4:00 p.m. See Section VIII.A.
o Full Proposal Due Date: November 13, 2018, 4:00 p.m.
• Anticipated Individual Awards: Multiple awards are anticipated.
• Anticipated Funding Available for Award: Each award will include a 24-month base period (a maximum of $500,000) and a 12-month option period (a maximum of $500,000).
• Types of Instruments that May be Awarded: Grants.
• Agency Contacts
• RA Email: YFA2019@darpa.mil
• RA Mailing Address:
DARPA
ATTN: DSO/DARPA-RA-18-02 675 North Randolph Street Arlington, VA 22203-2114
• DARPA/DSO Opportunities Website: http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/opportunities
• Teaming Information: See Section VIII.B for information on teaming opportunities.
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): FAQs for this solicitation may be viewed on the DARPA/DSO Opportunities Website. See Section VIII.A for further information.