DARPA solicits science to connect the dots
The defense research agency’s goal is to facilitate big hypothesis generation and accelerate discovery.
WHAT: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking research proposals for mathematical tools that will tie various aspects of research data into a unified framework.
WHY: As computational capabilities have improved, so has the need to make sense of the complex data they churn out in the fields of science and engineering. And as DARPA writes in its solicitation, "without tools to unify principles, results, models and data into a single computational representation, it is difficult to relate individual datasets to the larger body of knowledge at scale."
The research solicitation is part of DARPA’s Simplifying Complexity in Scientific Discovery, or SIMPLEX, program, which strives to develop “unified mathematical frameworks” to help accelerate discovery. “The ultimate goal of the program is to facilitate big hypothesis generation and accelerate discovery by correlating data across scientific domains,” the agency said in a Sept. 11 news release.
DARPA’s areas of interest for this research include neuroscience, gene-protein disease networks, materials science, climate science, autonomous systems and cyber-physical systems.
Click here to read the broad agency announcement. Replies are due by Nov. 6.