Sept. 27, 2011

WASHINGTON – The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), announced today that it has embarked on a multi-year research effort to produce a new capability to accelerate the process of identifying and prioritizing emerging technologies across the globe.  The Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) Program seeks to develop automated methods that aid in the systematic, continuous, and comprehensive assessment of technical emergence using publicly available information found in published scientific, technical and patent literature.

“Identifying what the technical trends and connections are, before the capability is fully developed, is critical to our mission of maintaining an intelligence advantage,” said Dewey Murdick, FUSE program manager at IARPA.

Today, the identification and assessment of emerging technical capabilities is a manual, time-consuming, domain-specific, and expert-intensive process.  Analysts are in need of a reliable, automated, evidence-based capability that allows them to rapidly identify specific technical areas for in-depth review.  IARPA plans to create a capability that can nominate both known and novel technical areas based on quantified indications and evidence of technical emergence.

“The globalization of science and technology means that capabilities can emerge from diverse technical areas anywhere in the world,” added Murdick. “We want to provide an evidence-based technical capability that enhances our competitiveness in a rapidly changing digital and technical age. In FUSE we are partnering with the scientific community to develop validated indicators and theories of technical emergence detection.”

The FUSE Program is designed to provide the analytic workforce with a cutting edge capability to sustain technical vigilance across multiple disciplines and languages. Through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) process, IARPA has awarded research contracts in support of FUSE to teams led by BAE Systems, Columbia University, Raytheon BBN Technologies Corporation, and SRI International.

IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff programs that have the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over our future adversaries.  For media inquiries, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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