DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automationBig Performance from Low-Power Hardware. Read more ... » moonshot like the selfWhen is CES 2016, what will be the best gadgets and how much are ticket prices?. Read more ... »-driving car challenges of the earlyHome IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applicationsNvidia Releases Machine Learning Products for Hyperscale Datacenters. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automation moonshot like the self-driving car challenges of the early 2000s or the recent (and hilarious) Robotics Challenge. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applications: radio frequency spectrum splitting. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape. Seriously, check out that cool chart at the top (much bigger version at DARPA's site if you want to print out the poster – 56k warning): everything is spoken for right up to the border with microwave frequencies, and more gadgets are crowding into each one daily. "The current practice of assigning fixed frequencies for various uses irrespective of actual, moment-to-moment demand is simply too inefficient to keep up with actual demand and threatens to undermine wireless reliability," said William Chappell, director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, in a DARPA press release.