DARPA Releases Strategic Catalyst Announcement for AI BTO

AI BTO’s goal is to fund proposals that catalyze the development of future high-impact research projects by clarifying opportunity space and making technical barriers easier to surmount. To achieve this goal, AI BTO’s objectives are to 1) produce novel datasets and/or 2) demonstrate innovative AI/ML approaches in the following five Technical Areas that could serve as a springboard for further program development at DARPA:

1. Prediction and Health – Develop transformational tools to improve health outcomes. These may include early exposure risk models, predictive disease assessments, personalized medicine predictions, interventions that avoid human or animal subject research, and novel experimental approaches to evaluate AI tool performance, risk, and benefit.
2. Autonomous Science – Enable multiple areas of autonomy that increase data generation and curation by at least 3 (ideally 6) orders of magnitude. Approaches may include disruptive autonomy, new cloud lab instances, and improved human-machine teaming.
3. Biomanufacturing/Synthetic Biology – Discover new techniques to design biomolecules based on desired material properties, function, and/or enzymatic activity. Improve biomolecule design using closed loop inferences that link sequence, structure, and function. Design tools to scale and accelerate bioproduction, prioritizing both biofidelity and economy.
4. Challenges with Scale – Devise mechanisms to handle challenging or sparse data sets for predictive models and develop digital twins across size and complexity scales from microbes to mammals.
5. Exciting Frontiers – Create biomolecules with ‘new to nature functionality’. Predict and design novel multicellular communities with desired collaborative functions. Develop modeling and prediction capabilities in entirely new areas of AI and biology, from biological data validation and constraints to explainability and trustability.

Proposers may submit a White Paper in response to one or more of the described Technical Areas. For more information on White Paper guidelines, including the required content and evaluation criteria, please reference the AI BTO Registration Page.