Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) Program

IARPA says it's looking for people "to 'scan the horizon' for the early signs of technical emergence, and take advantage of the resulting capabilities and applications, can gain a significant competitive edge." Among the proposals the FUSE program is considering, one stands out from New York University detailing a plan track emerging technologies using a linguistic algorithm that scans things like Apple patent filings.

Finder Program

The name of this initiative matches its goal in a delightfully literal way. IARPA wants to fund a project that makes it easier to find places in photographs. In the absence of geolocation tags, it's no easy task for an intelligence analyst to look at an image or video and figure out where it's from. Think about the part in spy movies where the spies pull up a picture of Matt Damon in a random European city and piece together exactly where he is--this program wants to automate all that. It's actually a pretty popular problem. Microsoft is trying to figure this out, too.

Great Horned Owl (GHO) Program

The goal of this program couldn't be more straight-forward: create a silent drone. IARPA warns that drones, officially known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are often picked off before they reach their target, because they make noise, so IARPA is looking for someone to get rid of the noise. This is one of many initiatives the government has floated in an effort to improve the drone fleet. Chief among them are some DARPA-funded project that set out to make drones that look like bugs.

Synthetic Holographic Observation (SHO) Program

Just as DARPA improves upon existing technology to give soldiers the upper hand, IARPA is also committed to crossover successes. In this instance, it's the kind of 3D technology that made watching Avatar so fun. In its call for proposals IARPA says it "seeks dynamic, high-performance, synthetic holographic 3D workstation display systems, simultaneously viewable by multiple people with the unaided eye." Yes, it's just like the thing that Princess Leia uses in Star Wars. The Associated Press also reports that IARPA has developed "'cloaking' technology that can bend radar around an object to make it appear it's not there."

Does all of this sound like fun? Well, in addition to researchers to build stuff, Iarpa is looking for a few good futurists to run their programs. "Good ideas" is listed as a job requirement.

Correction: An earlier version of this post mislabeled the OSI program as the FUSE program. They're now correct and we've added more information about the OSI program.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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