The Wizards at DARPA by David Ignatius

Political Crossfire The Wizards at DARPA

By David Ignatius

Has anything hopeful been happening in this toxic year of partisan politics and the coronavirus pandemic? Mercifully yes, and for a reminder of the wonders of the human imagination, consider what the wizards at DARPA have been up to lately.

Looking for an election break, I spoke on Monday with Victoria Coleman, who in September became director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as it’s formally known. Joining her was Peter Highnam, her deputy, who since January 2019 had been serving as its acting director.

That both Coleman and Highnam were born abroad illustrates one of America’s greatest assets – we’re still a magnet for the world’s smartest and most creative people. Long may that continue, whatever our current problems.

DARPA is a reminder that disease and political dysfunction can’t stop the innovation machine that is the United States. The agency that helped create the Internet, GPS, Siri and the humble computer mouse is still looking for what Coleman describes as “very risky, big bets, ‘if it works it changes everything’ kinds of ideas.” She and Highnam talked with me about a few of them, which DARPA has pressed forward on this year despite the pandemic.

Let’s start with a program called SenSARS, which the agency announced on Monday as one of its periodic “disruption opportunities.” The goal is to find new technologies – quickly – that can detect SARSCoV-2 and other pathogens in offices, classrooms and buildings. DARPA will start issuing grants before the end of January.

If that real-time sampling seems far-fetched, consider that DARPA has already developed a program called Sigma+ to detect chemical and biological threats in the air. It was field-tested in Indianapolis in August, when five non-toxic chemicals were released and tracked. A DARPA system to detect radiological or nuclear threats is already fully deployed in the bridges and tunnels and other transportation systems of New York City and northern New Jersey.

What about computing, which drives every other technology on the planet? DARPA for many years has funded breakthrough research in quantum computing, whose qubits can be both zero and 1 and any position in between, unlike traditional computers, whose bits are either zero or one. It’s a mind-boggling approach that eventually will transform computation. But the tiny qubits are so fragile that they have to be kept near absolute zero temperature, and even then, they last for only microseconds – which means that a universal quantum computer may be decades away.

Enter DARPA. The agency in September announced a program to use room-temperature atomic “vapors” for quantum sensing and imaging. (The acronym-addicted agency calls this one SAVaNT, for Science of Atomic Vapors for New Technologies.) Meanwhile, another DARPA

Artificial intelligence has been a DARPA project for several decades, but the pace is accelerating.

program is combining “noisy” (meaning short-lived) qubits with classical computers to solve some otherwise impossible optimization problems.

Another mind-blowing DARPA computing project seeks to use the magic of biology – the way our brains and bodies encode and remember information – to design computational devices of the future. A DARPA program called Lifelong Learning Machines, started three years ago, is trying to build true “learning machines” on the premise that “even the smartest of the current crop of AI [artificial intelligence] systems can’t stack up against adaptive biological intelligence.”

Artificial intelligence has been a DARPA project for several decades, but the pace is accelerating. Coleman told me the agency is spending $2 billion over the next five years to fund more than 60 AI programs, including more than 30 that are exploring “next generation” AI. Among those that caught my eye on DARPA websites are Explainable Artificial Intelligence so computers can tell us how they solved problems; and Media Forensics to help detect fakes; and Machine Common Sense.

Worried that the United States might lose its edge in manufacturing chips and other hardware, DARPA has funded what it calls the Electronics Resurgence Initiative, which seeks to boost what can be written on chips by 50 times, to experiment with photonics in chip design, and to increase speed of graphics processors 1,000 times.

And then there’s the DARPA stuff that just sounds cool: A computer algorithm that beat an ace F-16 pilot 5-0 in a series of simulated dogfights in August; a program called PALS (for Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors) that uses sea life - shrimp, grouper, reef formations – to detect the presence of submarines; and an unmanned vehicle that can navigate rivers, swamps and deserts – as well as highways.

We have a world of worries these days. But spend a little time browsing DARPA’s website, and you’ll realize that the United States maintains the genius for science and technology that created our modern world – and that it shows no sign of slowing down.