The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is an organization, within the

Office of the Director of National Intelligence The director of national intelligence (DNI) is a cabinet-level United States government intelligence and security official. The position is required by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 to serve as executive head o ...

(ODNI), that is responsible for leading research to overcome difficult challenges facing the

United States Intelligence Community The United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a group of separate US federal government, U.S. federal government intelligence agencies and subordinate organizations that work to conduct Intelligence assessment, intelligence activities which ...

. IARPA characterizes its mission as follows: "To envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage." 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 Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

. Most IARPA research is unclassified and openly published. IARPA transfers successful research results and technologies to other government agencies. Notable IARPA investments include

quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

superconducting computing Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in superconductors: materials where Electrical resistance and conductance, electrical resistance vanishes and Magnetic field, magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Unlike an ord ...

, machine learning, and forecasting tournaments.

Mission

IARPA characterizes its mission as "to envision and lead high-risk, high-payoff research that delivers innovative technology for future overwhelming intelligence advantage".

History

In 1958, the first Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, was created in response to an unanticipated surprise—the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

's successful launch of

Sputnik Sputnik 1 (, , ''Satellite 1''), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space progra ...

on October 4, 1957. The ARPA model was designed to anticipate and pre-empt such technological surprises. As then-Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy said, "I want an agency that makes sure no important thing remains undone because it doesn't fit somebody's mission." The ARPA model has been characterized by ambitious technical goals, competitively awarded research led by term-limited staff, and independent testing and evaluation. Authorized by the ODNI in 2006, IARPA was modeled after

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

but focused on national intelligence, rather than military, needs. The agency was formed from a consolidation of the

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

's Disruptive Technology Office, the

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is a combat support agency within the United States Department of Defense whose primary mission is collecting, analyzing, and distributing geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) to support national se ...

's National Technology Alliance, and the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. IARPA operations began on October 1, 2007 with Lisa Porter as founding director. Its headquarters, a new building in M Square, the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

's research park in Riverdale Park, Maryland, was dedicated in April 2009. In 2010, IARPA's quantum computing research was named ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'' magazine's Breakthrough of the Year. In 2015, IARPA was named to lead foundational research and development for the National Strategic Computing Initiative. IARPA is also a part of other White House science and technology efforts, including the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the

nanotechnology Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). At this scale, commonly known as the nanoscale, surface area and quantum mechanical effects become important in describing propertie ...

-inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing. In 2013, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

''s op-ed columnist David Brooks called IARPA "one of the government's most creative agencies."

Approach

IARPA invests in multi-year research programs, in which academic and industry teams compete to solve a well-defined set of technical problems, regularly scored on a shared set of metrics and milestones. Each program is led by an IARPA Program Manager (PM) who is a term-limited Government employee. IARPA programs are meant to enable researchers to pursue ideas that are potentially disruptive to the status quo. Most IARPA research is unclassified and openly published. Former director Jason Matheny has stated that the agency's goals of openness and external engagement serve to draw in expertise from academia and industry, or even individuals who "might be working in their basement on some data-science project and might have an idea for how to solve an important problem". IARPA transfers successful research results and technologies to other government agencies.

Research fields

IARPA is known for its programs to fund research into anticipatory intelligence, using

data science Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, stru ...

to make predictions about future events ranging from political elections to disease outbreaks to cyberattacks, some of which focus on

open-source intelligence Open source intelligence (OSINT) is the collection and analysis of data gathered from open sources (overt sources and publicly available information) to produce actionable intelligence. OSINT is primarily used in national security, law enforceme ...

. IARPA has pursued these objectives not only through traditional funding programs but also through tournaments and prizes. Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) is an example of one such program. Other projects involve the analysis of images or videos that lack

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

by directly analyzing the media's content itself. Examples given by IARPA include determining the location of an image by analyzing features such as the placement of trees or a mountain skyline, or determining whether a video is of a baseball game or a traffic jam. Another program focuses on developing

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

tools that can transcribe arbitrary languages. IARPA is also involved in

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

and alternative computing methods. In 2015, IARPA was named one of two foundational research and development agencies in the National Strategic Computing Initiative, with the specific charge of finding "future computing paradigms offering an alternative to standard

semiconductor A semiconductor is a material with electrical conductivity between that of a conductor and an insulator. Its conductivity can be modified by adding impurities (" doping") to its crystal structure. When two regions with different doping level ...

computing technologies". One such approach is cryogenic

, which seeks to use

superconductors Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in superconductors: materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic fields are expelled from the material. Unlike an ordinary metallic conductor, whose resistance decreases ...

such as

niobium Niobium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Nb (formerly columbium, Cb) and atomic number 41. It is a light grey, crystalline, and Ductility, ductile transition metal. Pure niobium has a Mohs scale of mineral hardness, Mohs h ...

, rather than

s, to reduce the energy consumption of future exascale supercomputers. Several programs at IARPA focus on

and

neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

. IARPA is a major funder of quantum computing research, due to its applications in

quantum cryptography Quantum cryptography is the science of exploiting quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution, which offers an information-theoretically secure soluti ...

. As of 2009, IARPA was said to provide a large portion of quantum computing funding resources in the United States. Quantum computing research funded by IARPA was named Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2010, and physicist David Wineland was a winner of the 2012

Nobel Prize in Physics The Nobel Prize in Physics () is an annual award given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for those who have made the most outstanding contributions to mankind in the field of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the ...

for quantum computing research funded by IARPA. IARPA is also involved in neuromorphic computation efforts as part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative and the National Nanotechnology Initiative's Grand Challenge for Future Computing. IARPA's

MICrONS The micrometre (English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American English), also commonly known by the non-SI term micron, is a uni ...

project seeks to

reverse engineer Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

one cubic millimeter of brain tissue and use insights from its study to improve

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Research programs

Below are some of the past and current research programs of IARPA.

Past research

Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) Program Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) was a program of the Office of Incisive Analysis (OIA) at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The program ran from June 2010 until June 2015. History The broad program announcemen ...

aimed "to dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision, and timeliness of intelligence forecasts for a broad range of event types, through the development of advanced techniques that elicit, weight, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts." * ATHENA Program was a research program about cybersecurity. It aimed "to provide an early warning system for detecting precursors to cyberattacks". * Babel Program developed "agile and robust speech recognition technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language in order to provide effective search capability for analysts to efficiently process massive amounts of real-world recorded speech". The program tried to develop software that could transcribe and search among all the languages. * Biometrics Exploitation Science & Technology (BEST) Program focused on trying to "significantly advance the state-of-the-science for

biometrics Biometrics are body measurements and calculations related to human characteristics and features. Biometric authentication (or realistic authentication) is used in computer science as a form of identification and access control. It is also used t ...

technologies". It was to discover techniques on utilizing biometrics from a subject in a less controlled environment which could produce a similar result to that in a controlled environment. * Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) Program's stated goal was "to enable full-parallax, full-color, high-resolution display of dynamic 3D data without head-gear, and possessing visually continuous perspectives without artifacts over wide viewing angles."

Current research

* Creation of Operationally Realistic 3-D Environments (CORE3D) aims to "develop rapid automated systems for 3-D models which are designed with complex physical properties and automated methods that will pull commercial, satellite, and airborne imagery." * Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation (CREATE) Program is about "to develop, and experimentally test, systems that use crowdsourcing and structured analytic techniques to improve analytic reasoning". It hopes to improve the intelligence community's ability to better understand evidence and sources in order to produce accurate information. * Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA) aims to "advance state-of-the-art artificial visual perception, and automate video monitoring." * Functional Genomic and Computational Assessment of Threats (Fun GCAT) aims to "develop next-generation biological data tools to improve

DNA sequence A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases within the nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA (using GACT) or RNA (GACU) molecule. This succession is denoted by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of the nu ...

screening, augment biodefense capabilities through the characterization of threats, and advance our understanding of the relative risks posed by unknown sequences." * Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC) aims to "improve accuracy in predicting worldwide geopolitical issues, including foreign political elections, interstate conflict, disease outbreaks, and economic indicators by leveraging the relative strengths of humans and machines." * Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) aims to "develop and deploy fully automatic systems that will allow English-only speakers to accurately and efficiently identify foreign language documents of interest." * Molecular Analyzer for Efficient Gas-phase Low-power Interrogation (MAEGLIN) aims to "develop a compact system capable of unattended environmental sampling and chemical identification with minimal (preferably no) consumables." * Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals with Context (MOSAIC) Program aims to develop "unobtrusive, passive, and persistent measurement to predict an individual’s job performance". It designs and tests

sensors A sensor is often defined as a device that receives and responds to a signal or stimulus. The stimulus is the quantity, property, or condition that is sensed and converted into electrical signal. In the broadest definition, a sensor is a devi ...

that can collect data about monitoring employees' work performance. * Rapid Analysis of Various Emerging Nano-electronics (RAVEN) aims to "develop tools to rapidly image current and future integrated circuit chips." * Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique (SMART) program.

Directors

* Steven Nixon (acting, 2007) * Tim Murphy (acting, 2007–2008) * Lisa Porter (2008–2012) * Peter Highnam (2012–2015) * Jason Matheny (2015–2018) * Stacey Dixon (2018–2019) *Catherine Marsh (2019–April 2024) *Dr. Richard "Rick" Muller (April 2024–present)

References

External links

* {{Authority control Agencies of the United States government United States intelligence agencies Quantum computing Research and development in the United States Government research Government agencies established in 2006 2006 establishments in the United States