A joint DIU-ATLA team of subject matter experts will evaluate applicants and select up to 5 companies per problem as finalists for participation in the Pitch Day in March 2025, to take place in Japan. Selected participants will have the opportunity to network among the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), Japanese Ministry of Defense (JMoD), defense industries, and non-traditional companies, including startups with dual-use technologies. A total of $300,000 U.S. Dollars in awards are available to the top performing company/companies.
Notwithstanding the above, DIU or ATLA may cancel the eligibility or cancel all or part of the screening results at its discretion if DIU or ATLA deems the application inappropriate or if there is any violation or irregularity in the requirements, etc. related to this challenge.
Problem Statements
The challenge consists of two problem statements, each requiring distinct solutions. Participants may submit proposals to address either or both problem statements. Participants must submit a separate proposal for each problem statement.
- Detection and Diagnosis of Biological Threats: It is necessary to provide biosurveillance analysts with the data science capabilities to promptly address crucial biosurveillance inquiries for decision-makers. This is complicated by the dynamic nature of emerging threats, where data informing responses to each threat varies considerably from previous instances.
- Judging Information Accuracy & Counter Disinformation: Disinformation on social media is a critical challenge, threatening public trust, national security, and democratic processes. The emergence of generative AI has made it easier to create elaborate and sophisticated fake videos, images, and audio. So, it is important to aim to prevent the spread of false narratives by utilizing advanced technological tools and expertise from qualified companies specializing in identifying, analyzing, and countering deliberate disinformation campaigns on social media platforms. The winners of the innovation challenge will provide a product and/or services that enable the identification and mitigation of false information.
Desired Solution Attributes:
1. Detection and Diagnosis of Biological Threats
Timely, insightful, objective, and relevant health threat and biothreat information is required to inform national security decisions across the continuum of conflict. This will be achieved through the biosurveillance program underpinned by a novel fit-for-purpose analytic capability enabling federated data collection, ingestion, processing, analysis, and insight production. The technical solution when used by the biosurveillance analysts should enable rapid development and dissemination of strategic, anticipatory, and current operations analysis for risk mitigation from health and biothreats.
To generate leadership-decision support and analytic products, this challenge seeks a dynamic cross-domain cloud-based information technology capability, enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, to make sense of big data and create analytic bandwidth for user-driven analysis and automation of routine processes across public health, biodefense, environmental, and intelligence data.
To support the biosurveillance program, this challenge seeks a system with the ability to adaptively license, ingest, structure, and correlate primary and secondary data sources at-scale to build a dynamic intelligence picture. The system should primarily be focused on streamlining and automating anticipatory analysis for biological and health-related questions, while simultaneously providing situational awareness for all levels of command. The system should be highly adaptable and support ad-hoc requests for information. This system is not intended to be an early warning algorithm; rather, it is intended to be the platform, infrastructure, and data visualization for use by biosurveillance analysts (human-computer interface) to generate early warning. The technical solutions will integrate with a range of existing or new capabilities, including the Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiative. Additionally, the solution should be capable of integrating with pre-existing, controlled data sources, pulling or pushing information as necessary to ensure interoperability.
The solution should successfully demonstrate the following:
- Demonstrate adaptive ingest capabilities, sense making at-scale, anomaly detection on primary data feeds amplified by metadata, AI methods for data structuring and semantic reasoning, fusion, and data processing, to enable all-source analytics.
- Demonstrate the ability to use tools for adaptive ingest of data provided by many entities, including interagency and international partners.
- Demonstrate use of geospatial and temporal techniques to associate foundational feeds with well-structured data.
- Demonstrate situational awareness and leadership decision support tools and information products, iterating from manual curation to automated collection and fusion to development, validation, deployment, and monitoring.
- Create, connect, structure, and correlate data feeds, getting data from sensors and sources across domains, partners, allies, and platforms, using industry-standard communication protocols.
- Enable (or provide) data scientists, software engineers, to join mission experts, on teams with the ability to receive and triage key questions, execute data analysis, deploy and monitor automated services.
- Remain modular and adaptable through open architecture software designs, data rights and formats, and application program interfaces (APIs), ultimately ensuring consistent and reliable sustainment, maintenance, and innovation for all digital tools.
- Demonstrate the ability to assess changing conditions, and work with customers from warfighters to policymakers to understand their key questions and respond with sophisticated solutions, while identifying opportunities for innovation (e.g., challenging long-standing assumptions and boundaries in health data analytics).
- Demonstrate the capability to enable rapid answers to key intelligence questions for leadership decision support.
- Demonstrate a mature understanding of using and creating application program interfaces to communicate with outside software platforms.
Multiple agreement awards are anticipated, and a single company is not expected to provide a solution that covers all solution areas. Preference will be given to product mixes that include solutions with evidence of similar deployments. Teaming arrangements may be facilitated among submissions offering complimentary capabilities to achieve desired effect. Companies are also welcome to present their own teaming arrangements in their solution briefs. If technology solutions are proprietary, performing companies will be expected to establish business to business safeguards that permit information sharing amongst teaming members in pursuit of solutions. Academic research proposals are not desired.
*Note to offerors: It is anticipated human subjects research may be required in performance of any subsequent agreement(s). Therefore, offerors should be aware that compliance with 32 CFR 219, DoDI 3216.02 will be mandatory, as applicable.
2. Judging Information Accuracy & Countering False Information
The goal of this innovation challenge is to enhance the capability to identify and counter disinformation on social media, thereby protecting public trust and the integrity of information. Proposals should focus on providing a clear path to achieving this outcome through technological innovation and strategic implementation.
By responding to this solicitation, companies confirm their understanding of the problem statement. We look forward to reviewing proposals that demonstrate innovative solutions tailored to these critical objectives.
The solution should successfully demonstrate the following:
- Employ artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and other advanced technologies to identify false information and malicious influence campaigns.
- Demonstrate the ability to attribute and localize disinformation campaigns to specific vectors i.e. campaign types, techniques, regions, and actors types (originators, disseminators, etc), among other identifiable characteristics.
- Provide explainable metrics that assess and communicate performance of the detection and attribution techniques and approaches implemented to both technical and non-technical users.
- Generate real-time reports analyzing the scope, spread, and impact of detected disinformation. Reports should include data visualization and trend analysis.
- Develop and recommend strategies to counter detected disinformation campaigns, including creating accurate counter-narratives.
- Continuously monitor social media channels and other digital platforms for emerging disinformation campaigns.
- Ensure compliance with data privacy and security standards, maintaining the confidentiality of monitored content and user information.
Benefits of Participation
- $300,000 USD in awards to the top performing companies
- Exposure to leaders across multiple branches of the DoD and JMoD
- Potential for follow-on opportunities such as Other Transaction (OT) Agreements, Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs), and others
- Potential for follow-on opportunities of contract with ATLA
Deadline:- 23-01-2025
