Looking for Funding? New Opportunity in Knowledge Curation
Government decision making is only as good as the information available to decision makers. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking at new ways to increase governmental capacity to make good decisions, including through inviting members of the public to apply for an innovative grant.
Are you a technologist or scientist interested in using technology to curate knowledge? DARPA announced its request for proposals from experts who care about the intersection of computation and decision-making. The DARPA Collaborative Knowledge Curation Advanced Research Concept is accepting proposals for one-year projects up to $300,000.
What is DARPA looking for?
The grant is focused on knowledge curation, which is described as acquiring information from many sources, identifying which nuggets of information are important and in what contexts, and using it to help make decisions. The grant’s goal is to address how knowledge curation can be partially automated to help analysts and decision-makers gain and maintain awareness in complicated, independent systems. More context is provided in the PDF entitled DARPA-EA-23-01-03.pdf.
By way of example: one missed opportunity is that the ban on the purchase of Russian oil didn’t include bans of the sale of ships to Russia, which allowed them to create a “shadow fleet” to ferry oil. Would it have been possible to use knowledge curation to help identify this missing piece?
This grant is particularly focused on collaborative knowledge curation for the purpose of identifying methodologies and technologies that treat humans and machines as partners in the partial automation of knowledge curation. Humans are experts that guide the technology both in terms of curation goals (i.e., what we’re trying to do) and common sense (understanding key terms).
DARPA seeks methodologies and technologies to curate knowledge regarding economic statecraft from among the following scenarios (don’t worry, it’s not that narrow):
What does the US need to know to evaluate the effects of economic sanctions?
What does the US need to know to plan and evaluate the success of climate statecraft?
How can we anticipate other countries’ responses to tensions between world powers?
The grant award
DARPA will provide $300,000 for one year to cover one person (an FTE) plus materials, equipment, and costs. You can retain ownership of your IP, but must give limited rights to the government.
How to apply
The initial proposal should be no more than five pages. They’ll be accepted on a rolling basis until Nov. 30, with the government responding to the initial proposals within 30 days. If you make it through this initial phase, you’ll be invited to submit an oral presentation, with accompanying materials. For more information on the application and review process, including how to format your proposal, click on this link. Also check out this webinar that explains the process.
Still unsure? DARPA can provide more information about what they’re looking for in an application. An email point of contact is at this link. More information about the project is here.
