If you imagine the U.S. research community as a family party, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is your crazy uncle ranting at the end of the table and the government’s other “ARPA” organizations are the in-laws who are buying into his theories.
DARPA and its counterparts—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—are responsible for conducting some of the most innovative and bizarre projects in the government’s $140 billion research portfolio. DARPA’s past research has laid the groundwork for the internet, GPS and other technologies we take for granted today, and though the other organizations are relatively new, they’re similarly charged with pushing today’s tech to new heights.
That means the futuristic-sounding projects the agencies are working on today could give us a sneak peek of where the tech industry is headed in the years ahead.
And based on the organizations’ 2019 research efforts, the future looks pretty wild.
DARPA Pushes the Limits of AI
Last year, DARPA announced it would invest some $2 billion in bringing about the so-called “third wave” of artificial intelligence, systems capable of reasoning and human-like communication. And those efforts are already well underway.
In March, the agency started exploring ways to improve how AI systems like Siri and Alexa teach themselves language. Instead of crunching gargantuan datasets to learn the ins and outs of a language, researchers essentially want the tech to teach itself by observing the world, just like human babies do. Through the program, AI systems would learn to associate visual cues—photos, videos and live demonstrations—with audible sounds. Ultimately, the goal is to build tech that ..
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