Voices from DARPA

In this episode of Voices from DARPA, synthetic biologist and program manager Justin Gallivan of the Agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) shares his vision of leveraging biology’s astonishing, evolution-honed abilities for making molecules and materials (think here of protein and wood) into powerful new technologies that fall into the emerging category of synthetic biology. Among the potential payoffs he discusses include pre-toughening warfighters’ guts for the microbial challenges they face in faraway missions and growing the structures of military installations from what could be thought of as seeds. Be warned: blue poop and interplanetary construction come up in this engaging discussion.

In this episode of Voices from DARPA, get inside the full-spectrum engineering head of Dr. Troy Olsson, a program manager since 2014 in the Agency’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). Listen in as Olsson describes progress toward vanishing materials that can keep sensitive electronic components out of adversaries’ hands; unmanned air vehicles that can deliver provisions and then just disappear; massive miniaturization of low-frequency antennas for underwater radio communication; and stand-alone sensors that require almost no power at all yet for years remain vigilant to sounds, radio signals, and other environmental signals of interest to warfighters. And then there’s those really far-out technologies that Olsson hopes to enjoy one day.

In this episode of Voices from DARPA, get to know Dr. Jonathan Pfautz, a program manager since 2015 in DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O), where he epitomizes the Agency’s deliberate blindness to traditional disciplinary boundaries. With a background in computer engineering and electrical engineering, as well as in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, Pfautz is seeking to develop new techniques for massive-scale simulations of social behavior, including information sharing, as it takes form and evolves within the context of today’s astoundingly powerful information technologies and online social networking infrastructures. Pfautz also is concerned about the evolution of human-machine etiquette. And listen in on how he and his wife are so profoundly devoted to the scientific enterprise that they named their daughters after two giants in the history of science.

Mr. Wade Shen of the Agency’s Information Innovation Office has made it his mission to improve how human beings and their computers put their respective heads and cognitive frameworks together to yield deep insight into how the world works and how information affects the way people think and act. Listen in on how Shen is enacting that mission with the DARPA programs he oversees, among them the Data Driven Discovery of Models (D3M) program, the Quantitative Crisis Response (QCR) program, and the Memex program, which is devoted to advancing search capabilities far beyond the current state of the art. Shen also muses about what it would take to build a universal translator that would enable all 7.4 billion people on the planet to overcome language barriers and to talk with one another.

In this episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Fariba Fahroo of the Agency’s Defense Sciences Office as she discusses how important mathematics can be for, in her words, “keeping our models honest.” By characterizing the uncertainties inherent in the computer models and algorithms we develop to better understand complex phenomena, such as the flow of air over aircraft surfaces and through engines, as well as to design, engineer, and control today’s ever more complicated civilian and military systems, Fahroo tells us how she aims to cultivate modeling frameworks within which these systems can be built and deployed with unprecedented degrees of confidence and insight into their strengths and vulnerabilities.

In this episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Lin Haas of the Agency’s Strategic Technology Office as he shares his expansive view on the current and future roles of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technology, whose most famous incarnation is known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Haas reveals ambitious PNT programs that include efforts to develop an undersea system that provides omnipresent positioning capabilities across ocean basins where GPS signals do not go and to exploit environmental signals, such as the electromagnetic features of lightning, for back-up geolocation service if GPS were to become unavailable. You will also learn how a guy ends up with the name Lin.

In this episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Blake Bextine of the Agency’s Biological Technologies Office as he talks about his virus- and insect-mediated vision for protecting food crops from natural and human-wrought threats, including drought and biological warfare. With his Insect Allies program, Bextine aims to increase food security by recruiting insects to deliver viruses, which have been modified to bear protective genes, into plants where those virus-carried genes could save the plants from the threats they face. His approach offers a number of potential advantages over today's slash-and-burn method of managing diseased crops. Bextine also shares some tips on how to find and cook insects, especially when you're in the wilderness and your stomach is growling.

In this episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Paul Cohen of the Agency’s Information Innovation Office as he talks about his efforts to develop better and more seamless ways for human intelligence and machine intelligence to combine their respective strengths into a hybrid and collaborative intelligence that can do more than either of its components.

In this episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Dev Palmer of the Agency’s Microsystems Technology Office as he talks about turning an early interest in the vacuum tubes of his guitar amplifiers into a career as an electrical engineer. His mission? To push electronic and electromagnetic technology along new frontiers that could lead to more capable radar, electronic warfare, and communications systems, and even to entirely new technologies. In his few years as a program manager, Palmer has scored a world record with the fastest linear amplifier ever made; opened the way to vastly increasing the power output of high-frequency circuits by developing next-generation, miniaturized vacuum electronic devices; and pioneered novel approaches to integrating minuscule magnetic components into the already super-dense microcircuitry on chips. One more thing: with the time he spends commuting, Palmer has given some thought to what it would take to usher teleportation from the science fiction side to the reality side.

In this third episode of DARPA’s podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Dan Green, as he discusses the Agency’s innovation-catalyzing roles in the Age of Semiconductors. For Green, silicon, the celebrity high-tech material of our times, is only one species in what he views as a semiconductor zoo. For his part, Green, who works in the Agency’s Microsystems Technology Office, has been overseeing DARPA’s efforts to usher the compound semiconductor, gallium nitride (or GaN), beyond its already transformative role in the world of LED lighting into a range of electronic and radiofrequency applications important for national security contexts--among them electronic warfare, radar, and communications--and eventually into an empowering variety of applications in the civilian world.

In the latest installment of DARPA’s new podcast series, Voices from DARPA, join program manager Lindsay Millard as she discusses the Agency’s satellite-protecting Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) program. From its mountaintop perch in New Mexico, this revolutionary optical telescope is enabling much faster discovery and tracking of previously unseen or hard-to-find small objects in orbit that could potentially collide with satellites, in a vast volume of space Millard likens to “tens of thousands of oceans.” SST’s wide-open eye on the sky has also become the most prolific tool ever for observing near-Earth objects and asteroids that could potentially impact Earth. After four years of extensive testing and evaluation, DARPA is celebrating the upcoming transition of SST to the U.S. Air Force on Tuesday, October 18, 2016.

In this premiere episode of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's new podcast series, Voices from DARPA, program manager Tyler McQuade, who works in the Agency's Defense Sciences Office, reveals his vision of accelerating scientists' ability to discover and make a vast variety of new molecules for medical, military, and many other applications.