Voices from DARPA

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, listeners will learn about an emerging component of DARPA’s institutional culture for delivering technologies that strengthen the nation and redefine what is possible. Called the Embedded Entrepreneurship Initiative (EEI) (https://eei.darpa.mil/), this effort is designed to help creative scientists and engineers usher their new high-technology visions all of the way to real in-field, hold-in-your-hand, useful-in-the-world technologies. The mission of EEI, now entering its second year following a pilot phase, is to provide early-stage technology-development teams with veteran innovators who bring with them the proven business savvy it takes to make it through the proverbial Valley of Death. That’s when anything from insufficient funding, missed deadlines, unexpected supply-chain issues, intellectual property disputes, market fluctuations, a federal policy change, or any number of other hazards can kill off even the best of technology ideas. Listeners will hear from Kacy Gerst, DARPA’s Chief of Commercial Strategy; Scott Cunningham, a Senior Commercialization Advisor with In-Q-Tel-Emerge, a technology-acceleration organization that is partnering with DARPA to make EEI work; and Jeff Conroy, CEO of Embody, an emerging biotechnology company that credits EEI with accelerating its success in launching what is now its first FDA-approved biomedical technology for improving ligament and tendon repair, a common need for athletes and military personnel. Gerst is happy to note that EEI already is working with more than 50 entrepreneurial teams and she expects the initiative to ramp up over the next few years to a portfolio of 150 such teams.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Sergey Bratus (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/dr-sergey-bratus), a program manager since 2018 in the agency’s Information Innovation Office (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/I2O), shares his educational and professional journey, beginning in the late 1970s as a computer-smitten middle-schooler in the former Soviet Union and leading to his current and prominent role among those who aim to render the increasingly prevalent and perilous software, hardware, and networks in our lives much safer to use. His fascination with computer security emerged in the 1990s as a mathematics graduate student when a computer he was programming and responsible for at Northeastern University in Boston was taken over by a hacker. “I probably owe whoever did that a beer,” Bratus tells listeners. Why? Because it set him on his life’s mission to learn as much as he can about the vulnerabilities of software and hardware with the goal of learning how to best minimize or eliminate those vulnerabilities. Noting his embrace of the hacker community for its deep and innovative expertise in this context, Bratus tells podcast listeners about how the programs he oversees at DARPA could help reduce or entirely remove even some of the most stealthy and unexpected vulnerabilities that reside in software and its logical, computational, and mathematical foundations.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Gordon Keeler (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/dr-gordon-keeler), a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Microsystems Technology Office (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/MTO), takes listeners on a scenic tour of his efforts to integrate electrons and photons in ways that do more computing, more sensing, more decision-making, and more artificial intelligence in cheaper, smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient packages than has been possible previously. His work is a showcase of what technology insiders refer to as SWaP-C, which stands for Size, Weight and Power, and Cost. Innovations that shrink one or all of those aspects of a technology can be far more important to realizing practical, affordable technologies and capabilities than the invention itself. As Keeler explains how these and other technology drivers unfold in the half-dozen electronic, photonic, and optoelectronic programs he oversees, he also reveals what inspired him to give up the stable and secure job he held for 14 years before arriving at DARPA. “I had no doubt really in my mind, DARPA clearly was the pinnacle of doing really innovative scientific research and development and leading the community to go do new things,” Keeler tells listeners. “I wanted to make an impact and DARPA was clearly a way to do that."

This episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast takes listeners on a tour of an audacious, decade-long project to merge biology and engineering into one of the most powerful engines of molecular invention the world has known. Although plenty of work remains to be done, the program, Living Foundries, is winding down to a close. But not before its community of research performers and collaborators already has delivered a new and versatile biotechnology platform whose consequences have begun to ripple out. New companies. Follow-on investments. Chemical- and materials-based technologies for the Department of Defense … and perhaps one day for the public at large. Featured in the podcast are reflections form three of the program managers who have been stewards of the program, two research performers who helped make real the vision of Living Foundries, and even the sound of one potential Living Foundries product doing what it does best.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, John-Francis Mergen (https://www.darpa.mil/staff/mr-john-francis-mergen), a program manager since 2020 in the agency’s Information Innovation Office (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/offices/BTO), recounts how his interest in science took off as a child when he received a gift of a low-power magnifier from a family friend who was a geologist. From that gift, Mergen says, he learned about the power of observation and of the mindset one brings into that elemental component of the scientific enterprise. For his part, Mergen has spent a lot of time observing the complex ebbs and flows of data packets, which are mobile portions of information that race every which way through the internet and then get reassembled on your computer into a web page, a picture, or an email message. One of the first DARPA programs Mergen started to run last year aims to optimize the efficiency of packet traffic and management based on dynamic prioritization of information categories, such as text, voice or images, while preserving privacy and confidentiality for the sender and recipient of those packets. Another program Mergen runs is anticipating emerging threats associated with the exploding population of internet-connected-devices—the Internet-of-Things (IoT)—with an eye on security-enhancing communications protocols. Mergen has skin in the game: he says he has several hundred devices (including an internet-connected beehive!) at home that are connected to the Internet. One of his newest programs, if successful, will deliver technology that applies artificial intelligence to manage IoT devices so that they automatically and securely configure themselves, in his words, “in a way that is useful but not in a way that can be used” by adversaries, criminals, and others seeking to do harm. In a program just getting underway, Mergen envisions vehicles, manufacturing tools, and other technologies with a kind of self-awareness, which would be based on the many sensors, actuation devices, and computers in their designs, along with the ability to leverage this gadget-based self-awareness into automatic adjustments of operations. The payoff? Mergen says it could lead to more capable and longer-lasting technologies that could bring out their own best in changing circumstances. One possibility is that already-deployed technologies would “discover” capabilities they have in specific situations that not even their designers had in mind.

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, Tristan McClure-Begley, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Biological Technologies Office, recounts how he knew he wanted to be a biologist at the age of 7. That, thanks to an engineer dad, a psychologist mom, and a catalytic high-school teacher, all of whom ignited Tristan’s curiosity. Now Tristan is a program manager overseeing an ambitious portfolio of programs that is expanding the boundaries of battlefield medicine as well as neurocognitive science and practice. One of his programs is laying ground work for molecular tissue-stabilization interventions to help severely injured warfighters survive long enough to receive the medical treatment that can save them. In another program he is overseeing, researchers are investigating how peripheral nerve stimulation can improve cognitive tasks such as learning a new language. Two other programs could redefine what is possible in pharmaceutical science and practice. One of these is opening pathways to so-called polypharmaceutical treatments in which a single therapeutic agent intervenes in multiple cellular or physiological targets associated with a disease. The current paradigm centers on developing drugs that interact with a single disease-relevant target. Another of Tristan’s ambitious programs is devoted to warfighters who are suffering from post-traumatic stress and other psychiatric challenges. Researchers working on this project are diving into the clinical successes of hallucinogenic substances, such as LSD and psilocybin, with an eye on identifying new agents that can deliver therapeutic value but without the hallucinogenic effects, which are not suitable for many patients. Says Tristan, “I pretty much want to learn everything about everything.” That’s how you get a DARPA program portfolio like his.

Voices from DARPA podcast, Alexander (Xander) Walan, a program manager since 2017 in the agency’s Tactical Technology Office, pegs the source of his lifelong fascination with aircraft and flight to the Chicago Air and Water Shows his dad took him and his four siblings to when they were children. At DARPA, he has applied that interest, his training in aeronautical engineering, a 22-year career in the Air Force overseeing some 70 technology-development programs, and an MBA to his oversight of programs featuring DARPA’s signature audacity. One program that Xander inherited from a previous program manager proved it was possible to fly and navigate massive aircraft in the stratosphere as potential supplements to satellites by exploiting differing wind conditions at differing altitudes.Test flights of the huge balloons at the center of the program triggered reports of UFOs. Another one of his programs took steps toward aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL), like a helicopter or drone, but at unprecedented speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. No X-plane prototype came out of that effort, but pathways forward and dead-ends to avoid did. Xander’s current primary project, known as the Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors (CRANE) program, is investigating ways of controlling how air flows over aircraft surfaces to open engineering pathways toward planes that can be steered without the need for moveable surfaces. One more thing: Xander recently got the green light for a small initiative to pursue, in his words, “battlefield personal mobility,” which could lead to small, quiet paragliders or helicopters as well as a type of aeronautic equipment long emblematic of the future: jet packs. Says Xander, “there’s some technology that’s now emerging that might make that more practical.” https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/podcast (https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/podcast)

In this episode of the Voices form DARPA podcast, listeners get a status report on DARPA’s ambitious and expansive Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) and learn about the many touchpoints that DARPA and the microelectronics sector have shared over the past half-century. Also in the podcast is a preview of a follow-on effort, ERI 2.0, which is designed to accelerate the transition of foundational research and development into prototyping, manufacturing, and delivery of next-generation microelectronics technologies.

Go into a science or engineering laboratory. Close your eyes. And listen. Welcome to our third Sounds of Innovation episode, an intermittent feature of our Voices from DARPA podcast. Rather than hearing the voices of program managers, which is normally what you get in a Voices from DARPA podcast, in each Sounds of Innovation episode, you hear some of the soundscapes of research and development, and you learn just a little bit about the world-changing capabilities those sounds could lead to. See if you can guess how the sounds were produced before our podcast host reveals their origin. One hint for the first set of soundscapes is that they have nothing to do with big drops of rain hitting a tin roof. Here’s a lead regarding the second soundscape: you might want to be sitting when the host reveals the extreme-tech that produced the sound. For the third set of sounds, let’s just say that if you were a mosquito – and we are not saying you are – the sounds definitely would not be music to your ears.

Voices from DARPA podcast, Scott Wierzbanowski, a program manager since 2016 in the agency’s Tactical Technology Office, recounts how he came of age in a family of test pilots and then embraced the mission of fostering technologies for amplifying the capabilities of airmen, their aircraft, and other defense assets in the sky. Recorded in March 2021, a month before the end of his tour of duty at DARPA, Wierzbanowski, a retired Air Force test pilot, opens windows in the podcast on a lofty and ambitious portfolio of programs that reach even to space. One program delivered hard-won lessons on what it will take to engineer and build an unmanned reusable vehicle that can ferry payloads to low earth orbit with the ease and agility of an aircraft. Another program furthered the ability of human pilots to seamlessly team with automated and robotic systems to achieve complex mission needs with more dexterity than could either team member alone. Two of Wierzbanowski’s programs have been taking steps toward aerial capabilities in which a host aircraft and its crew work, in one case, with multiple sensor-bearing, unmanned, aerial scouts that depart from and return to the mother ship, and in another case, with unmanned weapons-bearing aerial vehicles that can project force in forward positions while enabling expensive and exquisite defense aircraft and their crews to remain out of harm’s way. When he sums up his vision, Wierzbanowski says it’s all about “distributed air operations” in which “UAVs are the ones going into high threat areas and manned aircraft are the ones that are overseeing the complicated air battle.”