The head of the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is leaving the unit this month to take a job with a quantum computing company, WIRED has learned. Rick Muller's pending departure from IARPA comes amid broader efforts to downsize the United States intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees IARPA. A person familiar with Muller's plans confirmed to WIRED his departure from IARPA. Born during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, IARPA is tasked with testing AI, quantum computing, and other emerging technologies that could aid the missions of spy agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency. The Trump administration reportedly has been moving to cut the workforces of intelligence agencies as part of the president's broad efforts to dismantle diversity programs and streamline government operations.

The Deep Intermodal Video Analytics (DIVA) program, which is run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is "creating …

WASHINGTON – The intelligence community now has a tool that allows English-speaking users to search through foreign language text and speech for information. The new tool was developed by Raytheon BBN Technologies in partnership with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity -- an organization within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that develops technologies to solve some of the intelligence community's hardest problems. Essentially, once English-speaking users enter a search query in English, the program looks through foreign language documents and recordings to find relevant results, translating those phrases back into English before presenting results back to the user. It's an "English-in, English-out" tool, and the company claims its system allows operators to search foreign documents, find results and understand their context and meaning without having to speak the language, according to a Jan. 31 announcement. Raytheon said they used Kazakh, Pashto, Somali, Swahili and Tagalog as the low data foreign languages for its machine learning algorithm, which was additionally tested against Farsi, Bulgarian, Lithuanian and Georgian.

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks has published his latest article as a member of Executive Mosaic's GovCon Expert program on Wednesday. Brooks discussed the development and procurement of emerging technologies as they influence every sector of the federal marketplace, including the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), academia and the intelligence community. You can read Chuck Brooks' latest GovCon Expert article below: The development and procurement of emerging technologies is being institutionalized throughout government, particularly in national security areas. There are a variety of new initiatives and programs that have been created to ensure that the United States is prepared for a new era of technology leadership. If you are interested in transformative technologies, it is an exciting time to follow what is happening both in industry and in government.

It could be argued that scientists create superpowers in their labs. If Aram Galstyan, director of the Artificial Intelligence Division at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI) had to pick just one superpower, it would be the ability to predict the future. What will be the daily closing price of Japan's Nikkei 225 index at the end of next week? How many 6.0 or stronger earthquakes will occur worldwide next month? Galstyan and a team of researchers at USC ISI are building a system to answer such questions.

Congress is authorizing $10 million in prize money to help the Defense Department reach out to the public to battle foreign disinformation, and to further ramp up the Pentagon's 5G technologies. The 2020 defense authorization act allows the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to use the funds for two prize competitions: one for 5G, and the other to study and detect deepfake technology. Deepfakes are videos manipulated to look like a celebrity or politician said something they did not say. Foreign and domestic groups are using the videos to sway public opinion. The defense authorization act allows IARPA $5 million specifically for stimulating "the research, development, or commercialization of technologies to automatically detect machine-manipulated media."

In science fiction and real life alike, there are plenty of horror stories where humans trust artificial intelligence too much. They range from letting the fictional SkyNet control our nuclear weapons to letting Patriots shoot down friendly planes or letting Tesla Autopilot crash into a truck. As conflict on earth, in space, and in cyberspace becomes increasingly fast-paced and complex, the Pentagon's Third Offset initiative is counting on artificial intelligence to help commanders, combatants, and analysts chart a course through chaos -- what we've dubbed the War Algorithm (click here for the full series). But if the software itself is too complex, too opaque, or too unpredictable for its users to understand, they'll just turn it off and do things manually. At least, they'll try: What worked for Luke Skywalker against the first Death Star probably won't work in real life.

The intelligence community's (IC) stock in trade has always been knowing what nobody else knows. Now it's looking to tap into new technology to expand its ability to forecast geopolitical events in several ways, including finding out what everybody knows. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the IC's lead research arm, is looking to bring artificial intelligence to bear in a number of intelligence-gathering areas. This includes two projects at opposite ends of the spy game: at one end, intercepting and interpreting classified communications, and at the other, finding a way to read the tea leaves in massive amounts of public information. IARPA recently launched a competition to support its Mercury program, which focuses on the more familiar (to the public anyway) element of spycraft known as signals intelligence.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have a new project: Reverse-engineer the brain. Ultimately, their goal is to "make computers think more like humans." Now, their five-year research effort has been funded by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) for $12 million. The research effort, through IARPA's Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) research program, is part of the U.S. BRAIN Initiative to revolutionize the understanding of the human brain. It's being led by Tai Sing Lee, a professor in the Computer Science Department and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC). "MICrONS is similar in design and scope to the Human Genome Project, which first sequenced and mapped all human genes," Lee said.

Government intelligence agencies have a plan to build computers that store information inside DNA and other organic molecules. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that develops technologies for U.S. intelligence services, announced plans to develop "tabletop"-sized machines that can store and retrieve data from large batches of polymers -- a term that refers to a wide variety of long, stringlike molecules. Polymers can store data in the sequence of individual atoms or groups of atoms. The project, which was reported by Nextgov, is an attempt to solve a basic problem of the modern era: the vast and growing costs of data storage.