Victoria Coleman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, said DARPA wants to establish a storefront and considers launching a tech accelerator to connect with new companies with innovative technologies, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

For the storefront, Coleman said she wants it to be a “very casual, informal kind of space” where “people can begin to understand better what our work is, what the opportunities are for them for working with us.”

She said the tech accelerator would “incubate” companies with novel technologies, provide them with mentorship support, workspaces and investments via a national security seed fund and link them to components within the Department of Defense through the Defense Innovation Unit.

“Putting an accelerator on the ground will be really important,” she said. “And of course, you know, Silicon Valley is the first place if you think about it, and that’s right, but it’s not the only place where innovation happens that the department needs to be connected with.”

Coleman will deliver a keynote speech at the Potomac Officers Club’s 7th Annual Defense Research and Development Summit on Jan. 14. The event will highlight the latest R&D priorities within the defense sector and advances and challenges within the development and delivery of innovative platforms.

Click here to register for the 7th Annual Defense R&D Summit.

The U.S. Space Force (USSF) plans to establish its own intelligence center that would represent the service branch in the intelligence community starting this year, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

USSF intends to stand up the National Space Intelligence Center over the year and develop a pair of corresponding analysis squadrons. The space and counter-space analysis squadrons will make up the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, the core component of NSIC.

Maj. Gen. Leah Lauderback, director of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for the Space Force, said both U.S. Space and Air Forces are making assessments on how to establish the two squadrons as joint centers.

“As a commander, there’s no way that we want to destroy the synergy that comes out of all of these squadrons being able to walk down the hallway and talk to each other,” Lauderback said.

The director added USSF needs more orbital sensors to properly characterize activity in space, something she considers a priority.

The U.S. Army and its partners have created machine learning algorithms designed to help soldiers make decisions in difficult combat situations.

Army Research Laboratory (ARL) partnered with IBM, the University College London and the U.K.'s defense science and technology laboratory to develop the algorithms, the Army said Wednesday.

These algorithms consider response time, resource availability and other factors in making decisions, the Army said Wednesday.

“Example applications of our algorithms include determining which services to run at computational nodes at the tactical edge, deciding whether to dispatch forces to a certain location of interest, etc.” said Shiqiang Wang, a researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. 

The research looked at, among other problems, the case of when an individual must decide whether to download data on the edge of the battlefield, forward requests or utilize a remote service for data processing. Each choice comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Kevin Chan, an ARL researcher, said the algorithms perform based on consistency and robustness as performance quantifiers. Consistency measures an algorithm's performance with accurate predictions, and robustness quantifies performance when only inaccurate predictions are available.

“Our algorithms include a control parameter that can trade-off between consistency and robustness," Chan said.

“In this way, we can perform well when the prediction is accurate, and at the same time not too badly when the prediction is inaccurate,” he added.

The team will work further to identify more use cases for the theoretical framework developed through the research.

Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), on Dec. 15 at Eglin AF Base, test-flew a new technology designed to enable semi-autonomous collaboration between multiple weapon units.

An F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft carried then dropped two Collaborative Small Diameter Bombs (CSDBs) that communicated with one another to detect targets, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

The CSDBs used a set of engagement rules and preloaded constraint programming to identify a detected jammer as a low-priority target, then communicated again to determine a pair of high-priority targets.

The test, however, experienced improper weapon software loading that led to an error with the weapon navigation system. The system requires updated target information for accurate engagements.

Collaborative systems perform based on predefined programming and must align with this set of rules with every semi-autonomous action.

AFRL worked with Scientific Applications and Research Associates to develop the collaborative weapons under the Air Force Golden Horde Vanguard program.

"Completion of this first mission sets the stage for further development and transition to the warfighter,” said Chris Ristich, director of AFRL's transformational capabilities office.

NASA has unveiled four astrophysics research proposals for the agency’s Pioneers program that will receive funding to support agency efforts to explore topic areas such as exoplanets, galaxy evolution, neutron star merging and high-energy neutrinos.

NASA said Thursday the proposals are subject to a concept study review ahead of flight approval. Pioneers has a funding cap of $20 million and allows participants to use of government-developed telescopes as well as off-the-shelf space vehicles.

Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division at NASA, said the agency received more than 20 proposals from NASA centers, research laboratories and universities for the program.

“The principal investigators of these concept studies bring innovative, out-of-the-box thinking to the problem of how to do high-impact astrophysics experiments on a small budget,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The selected proposals include the Aspera mission, which will use a small satellite to study galaxy evolution, and the Pandora smallsat mission to observe 20 stars and their corresponding 39 exoplanets.

Other missions include the StarBurst and PUEO efforts which will respectively use a smallsat and a balloon to detect high-energy gamma rays and neutrino signals to study neutron star mergers.

Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and Wash100 awardee, has said the agency is working to “isolate” suspicious activities in a cloud environment to support remote work operations, DoD News reported Thursday.

Norton told attendees at a virtual AFCEA event that DISA has been working on the Cloud Based Internet Isolation (CBII) initiative over the past 10 months as part of the agency’s efforts to integrate industry capabilities and rapid-acquisition methods.

CBII entails containing and eliminating web-based threats in a cloud environment instead of DoD networks and personal devices, she noted. According to Norton, CBII also requires less bandwidth through the use of a virtual private network.

"Our primary goal is to preserve and protect the ability of our workforce to conduct mission central operations that we support on national defense and current worldwide military missions," she said.

Norton's comments come after the service branches launched efforts to implement Microsoft Teams-based commercial virtual remote tools to address telework needs.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has previewed the subject areas for the Small Business Innovation Research program in fiscal year 2021, covering topics such as materials, infrastructure and safety across DOT's operating administrations.

DOT said Thursday it anticipates its six operating administrations to issue a total of 13 subject areas for fiscal 2021's solicitation, with funds up to $1.9 million. The department will also host a second annual pitch day during the fiscal year to enable small businesses in presenting their proposals to DOT.

"Small businesses are responsible for two-thirds of net new jobs created in America; this small business innovation research program will help small companies in the transportation sector to build the transportation system of the future," said Elaine Chao, secretary of DOT.

SBIR seeks to help small businesses commercialize their concepts through federal research and development activities.

The operating administrations are:

• Federal Highway Administration
• Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
• Federal Railroad Administration
• Federal Transit Administration
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
• Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

Mike Pompeo, secretary of the Department of State, has approved plans to establish a bureau aimed at ensuring the security of U.S. emerging technologies and cyberspace capabilities.

The State Department said Thursday the Bureau of Cyberspace Security and Emerging Technologies will spearhead U.S. efforts to foster international partnerships and drive the discussion on technology and cyber policy issues while mitigating cyber conflict.

CSET’s establishment will also help the State Department engage “as effectively as possible” on national security concerns, the department noted.

According to the State Department, the allocation of resources for U.S. security diplomacy in cyberspace and emerging technologies is critical amid increasing challenges brought by adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

The State Department notified Congress of plans to create CSET in 2019.