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October 29 - November 10, 2020
The Smithsonian Institution panel eventually recommended to the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering that ARPA conduct a comprehensive program that would include both the behavioral and the computer sciences. That recommendation was translated by Pentagon officials into two separate assignments handed down to ARPA: one in the behavioral sciences, which would include everything from the psychology of brainwashing to quantitative modeling of society, and the second, in command and control, which would focus on computers.
In 1971, the Beirut office was asked to look into the little-known threat of “improvised explosive devices,” the technical name for homemade bombs.
After spending nearly $20 billion, the director of that agency, called the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, admitted in 2010 that the best method the Pentagon had for detecting bombs was still a dog. The 1971 ARPA report, in the meantime, sat in a box in the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland.
Heilmeier created a series of questions that he called the “catechism,” which he made the litmus test for any program brought to his office: First what are you trying to do? How is it being done now, and what are the limitations of current practice? What’s new in your approach? Why do you think it can be successful? If you are successful, what difference does it make? How much money does it need, and how long is this going to take? What are the midterm and final exams?
DARPA eventually turned over the imagery analyst gear to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the brain-reading goggles went to the army’s Night Vision Laboratory. Technically, that meant both programs “transitioned,” DARPA-speak for technologies that have successfully gone to the military, but it appears that neither was ever used outside of a lab.
Learning Applied to Ground Vehicles, or LAGR, focusing on machine learning.
The Pentagon’s immediate response to casualties, mostly caused by homemade bombs, was to establish an agency known as the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. A few former officials wondered why the Pentagon did not turn to DARPA, whose resident technical expertise and ability to work quickly outside bureaucracy would have made it ideal as a place for the bomb-fighting mission. No one in the Pentagon appears to have even considered the option.
Personalized Assistant That Learns,
“Beer for Data” program,
Transformation Convergence Technology Office, a name so incredibly awkward it seemed tailor made for hiding secret programs. —
Crowdsourcing was part of the booming field of “big data,”
Alex “Sandy” Pentland, an MIT computer science professor
Pentland had reason to be self-confident. He had already established a reputation as one of the nation’s leading “big data” scientists.
His specialty was sifting through data to predict patterns of human behavior, an area he called “social physics.”
Pentland theorized that someone’s position in the network—his or her social standing—was the primary motivator. In his calculation, people act to make their social fabric stronger, not necessarily just to earn a bit of money. “I give you a favor. Maybe in the future you’ll give me a favor. That’s what drove this thing,” he said. “That’s a very different way of thinking about things. Instead of paying attention to individuals, you pay attention to relationships.”
High Altitude LIDAR Operations Experiment,
The danger facing the agency today is irrelevance to national security. In 2003, when the American military in Iraq found that its greatest threat was not from tanks and missiles but from roadside bombs, the Pentagon did not, as it once did, turn to DARPA, an agency stacked with top-notch technical personnel and decades of experience in bomb detection. Instead, it created an entirely new organization that was largely bereft of the type of science and technology expertise long resident in DARPA. What followed is hardly surprising: billions of dollars were spent, and yet casualties from bombs
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“By the time you get the real building done, you’re finished as an organization,” Reis said.
Long Range R&D Planning Program
Regina Dugan, director, DARPA
