CKC Opportunity Description

Overview: DARPA/DSO has issued an ARC Opportunity inviting submissions of abstracts for innovative methodologies and technologies to support collaborative knowledge curation (https://www.darpa.mil/ARC). ARC Opportunities are designed to allow individual researchers to explore paradigm-shifting ideas for national security applications. This CKC Opportunity is issued under the umbrella ARC Exploration Announcement (EA), DARPA-EA-23-01.

Background: In a world of increasingly complicated and interdependent systems, analysts and decision-makers spend more and more time curating the knowledge that informs their models and decisions. Knowledge curation involves acquiring information from many sources; triaging it as unimportant, contextual, or actionable; identifying factors and causal links; finding associated datasets; and developing metrics to measure objectives. This process is integral to successful economic statecraft, where knowledge curation is used to convert natural language objectives, such as “building soft power,” into measurable, causal hypotheses, such as “Increasing D will increase X, as measured by I.” Despite being a vital step in the decision-making process, knowledge curation is usually done by hand, which means analysts and decision-makers often miss important factors in complicated socioeconomic systems. For example, restrictions on the purchase of Russian oil did not include bans on the sale of ships to Russia, allowing the growth of a “shadow fleet” ferrying oil in defiance of price caps. The CKC ARC Opportunity will explore how machines can help analysts and decision-makers curate information faster and more thoroughly.

Solicitation Question: The CKC ARC Opportunity is soliciting ideas to explore the following question: How can we partially automate knowledge curation to help analysts and decision-makers gain and maintain awareness in complicated, interdependent systems?

Scope: The CKC ARC Opportunity solicits methodologies and technologies that treat humans and machines as partners in the partial automation of knowledge curation. This ARC Opportunity seeks reusable knowledge curation methodologies and technologies; building scenario-specific models at the expense of a generalizable approach is not within scope. Extracting causal factors by applying machine learning to quantitative data is not sufficient without significant human-machine collaboration. Expert-driven approaches such as knowledge engineering are of particular interest.

Special Notice

Event Participation

Registration

There is no registration fee for the webinar. The registration deadline is Wednesday, July 26, 2023 at 12:00 PM EDT or when attendance capacity is met, whichever comes first. There will be no same-day registration. Advance registration is required for all events and is mandatory for every individual intending to view the webcast either alone or as part of a group. Individuals who are unable to register because the deadline has passed or capacity has been reached (350 participants) for the webinar, will be added to a waitlist. If slots remain open after registration closes or become available due to cancellations, the slots may be filled on a first come, first served basis from the waitlist.

Individuals within the same organization interested in attending the webinar are encouraged to coordinate attendance internally within their organizations prior to registration since DARPA will limit participation to three (3) people per organization.

Eligibility

The CKC Webinar is only open to registered potential proposers, i.e., the events are closed to the general public and media. For this particular program, registration is open to potential proposers who are U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, and foreign nationals.

All registrants who are not U.S. Citizens must complete and submit either a DARPA Form 60 (U.S. Permanent Resident and Foreign National Visit Request – e.g., industry or academia) or an Official Visit Request (foreign government personnel, only) through the Embassy based in Washington, DC, no later than Monday, July 24th at 5:00 PM EDT. Failure to submit before this date may result in registration cancellation to allow for waitlist participants to register. Form 60 submission instructions will be provided in the registration confirmation email. Contact your Embassy staff for assistance in submitting the Official Visit Request.

Agenda

Webinar Information

This meeting will be held on the ZoomGov webinar platform. Content on this platform is restricted to Public Releasable Information only.

Downloading the Zoom application is suggested but understood that there are affiliation restrictions. Therefore, the alternative would be to join by web browser.