Information Innovation Office (I2O) Office Wide | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O) Office Wide solicitation (Funding Opportunity Number: DARPA BAA 14-39) is a broad, open call for high-risk, high-payoff research in information science and technology that can create major, rapid shifts in national security capabilities. The core intent is to fund unconventional ideas that challenge standard assumptions and could produce revolutionary advances in systems, devices, or foundational science. Proposals that mainly deliver incremental, evolutionary improvements to existing approaches are explicitly discouraged.

The opportunity is framed around how conflict is increasingly shaped by information in both traditional operational domains (land, sea, air, space) and emerging ones, especially cyber and irregular warfare. I2O is looking for technologies that help the United States and its allies gain and sustain a decisive information advantage as warfare, commerce, and critical infrastructure become more networked and data-driven. A major emphasis is the need to move beyond the common "find vulnerabilities, patch, repeat" security cycle. DARPA highlights that patch-based security often fails over time because new releases introduce new flaws and even patches can create additional vulnerabilities. In response, I2O is interested in approaches that can change the underlying security paradigm, including system heterogeneity, formal methods and proofs, secure code generation, and automation. While the portfolio is strongly focused on defense, the solicitation also notes that research into offensive methods is important because it can expand and inform defensive concepts. The technical scope includes enterprise networks, secure communications, industrial control and other industrial systems, and purpose-built military systems.

A second major thrust is advanced data-centric and human-centric information technologies that improve how analysts, operators, and systems perceive, understand, and interact with the world. The solicitation points to exponential growth in computing, bandwidth, storage, and pervasive sensing as drivers for "big data" style capabilities that can quantify and re-examine a wide range of human activities, from economic behavior to military operations. I2O is interested in both deep foundational work (for example, mathematical properties of graphs and methods for online correlation related to societal unrest) and applied efforts tied to operational data and transition pathways into the national security community. There is clear interest in end-to-end pipelines: collecting and validating data, cleaning and preprocessing messy or incomplete datasets, building scalable algorithms, and turning outputs into usable tools with interfaces that support decisions.

The topic list is intentionally wide, but the solicitation calls out specific areas of interest. On the cyber and assurance side, examples include secure cloud computing, software with mathematically provable security properties, automated cybersecurity systems, techniques for maintaining security even when the underlying computing infrastructure cannot be trusted, insider threat detection and response, and resilient operations after an attack (detection, cleanup, reconstitution, and continuing mission effectiveness). On the analytics and computation side, DARPA highlights scalable computational tools, advanced user interfaces, preprocessing for corrupted or disaggregated datasets, and processing methods for multimodal and real-time streaming data, including situations where storage at full scale is infeasible. It also seeks algorithms for analyzing dynamic, unlinked, or scripted content and tools that can infer relationships, correlations, or anomalies from weak proxy data when the true quantities of interest are not directly observable.

Additional areas span multimodal data fusion (from traditional overhead sensing to open-source data), automated language translation and understanding, semantic analysis, and programming languages. The solicitation also includes foundational and emerging technology themes such as virtual and blended worlds, machine-to-machine and internet of things concepts, environment modeling and reconstruction, crowd-sourced data processing, modeling of human activity and tendencies, analytics of economic systems, scalable education and training technologies, electronic warfare and cyber systems, biometrics and provenance, online information validation and evidence collection, resilient command and control with secure information exchange, assured information access, and privacy science and systems. Taken together, the portfolio aims to connect theory and algorithms to operationally relevant capabilities that can function under real-world constraints like adversarial manipulation, incomplete information, scale, and the need for rapid action.

From an administrative standpoint, this was a discretionary R&D funding opportunity in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category (CFDA 12.910, Research and Technology Development). The solicitation allowed multiple award instruments, including grants, cooperative agreements, other transactions, and procurement contracts, and it stated no cost sharing or matching requirement. Eligibility was listed as unrestricted (open to any type of entity, subject to any clarifications in the full announcement). The posting date was July 15, 2014, with an original and current closing date of July 15, 2015, and it was archived on August 14, 2015. The announcement referenced additional details in the full DARPA BAA 14-39 documentation (linked via FedBizOpps at the time) and provided a DARPA/I2O BAA Coordinator contact for access issues.

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