2024 DARPA & DoD Budgeted Project Highlights

[EndtheMadnessNow]

The proposed budget for DoD in fiscal year 2024 totals $842 billion. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about the same as the amount appropriated for 2023 (excluding the supplemental funding provided in 2023) but is 5 percent more than the amount anticipated for 2024 in the previous FYDP.



Summary breakdown of 268 pages of projects:

• Multiple inferences of impending supply-chain collapse & bioengineered microbial nutrient solutions
  
• Multiple projects related to operating in extreme cold, electromagnetically unpredictable, austere and GPS-compromised environments
  
• Sustained focus on "dis/misinfo" and internet-scale automated agents to detect/counterinfluence it
  
• Increased focus on introspective, symbolic, contextual, and inference-based machine learning
  
• Increased focus on "cyber-physical" systems & operators receiving instruction from AI.
  

A few that caught my interest...

Perceptually Enabled Task Guidance (PTG)

Integration of human perception and reasoning capabilities with AI/augmented reality creating a feedback loop between human and machine through "knowledge transfer," "perceptual grounding," and "perceptual attention".



ASIST

Development and implementation of socially intelligent computational agents able to "partner" with "complex teams" and demonstrate situational knowledge, inference, and predictive capacity relative to their human counterparts.




Guaranteeing AI Robustness against Deception (GARD)

AI technology designed to identify engineered multimedia data in large scale datasets intended to deliberately skew results.




Human Social Systems

Full-spectrum toolkit for interpreting, characterizing, forecasting, and constructing mechanisms for responding to (influencing) social and behavioral systems "relevant to national security," with a specific focus on "mental health".




ECOLE

Development of continually learning AI agents to enable collaborative human-machine analysis of multimedia with a specific focus on training AI to perform intuitive (human) analysis of symbolic and contextual representations.




ModMetaCog: Modular Meta-cognition

Development of "machine introspection technologies" that enable AI systems to analyze and explain their own behaviour and identify performance issues using nested "meta-cognition" architecture.




Fundamental Limits

A blanket budget of $36MM to "push the limits" of physics, chemistry, mathematics, biology and engineering in areas such as quantum interfaces, quantum simulators, photonics, particle acceleration, and spintronics




Molecular Systems and Materials Assembly

Development of new materials & manufacturing processes through control of arrangement, interactions & assembly of atoms & molecules focused on "addressing supply chain/sustainment challenges" with "human macronutrients" in microbial food.




Engineering Functional Materials with Biology

Further "supply chain" driven bio-manufacturing project focused on the "assembly of hierarchical biological systems" and production of "critical molecules and materials in austere environments." [they always tell you]



Continue...