ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are asking for industry's help in automating how to determine if proposed new enabling technologies are worth pursuing, and weed-out false capability claims.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., released a broad agency announcement last week (HR001124S0013) for the Scientific Feasibility (SciFy) project.
SciFy seeks to develop computational methods that measure the feasibility of claims to assess scientific content and value, and help determine the scientific feasibility of claims using automated reasoning to break claims down into verifiable parts.
Although automating how to assess technology is making progress, determining feasibility of advanced technologies like quantum computing often requires deep technical expertise, access to detailed information about the technology, and the ability to conduct testing or independent verification.
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Overcoming these challenges requires developing new ways to review, reason, verify, and evaluate capability claims automatically -- especially in sensitive areas surrounding national security and defense, researchers say.
SciFy will produce methods that perform well beyond current automated fact-checkers, and develop sophisticated automated techniques to manage and judge evidence, ensuring that the synthesis and explanation of this evidence is efficient and reliable.
SciFy has two technical areas: feasibility assessment; and test and evaluation. Feasibility assessment centers on breaking technology claims down to reasoning chains, and then evaluating those chains.
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Test and evaluation seeks to produce gold-standard large sets of labelled content for use in technical evaluations. A critical component of evaluation involves using artificial intelligence (AI) for claim feasibility measurement.
Companies interested should email abstracts no later than 18 March 2024, and full proposals no later than 25 April 2024 to the DARPA BAA website at https://baa.darpa.mil.
Email questions or concerns to DARPA at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/c4c8d4554adc42a888f22d3c2047a3ae/view.
