DARPA research funding opportunity aimed at recent PhD graduates whose employment prospects have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic

by Posted on

A DARPA research funding opportunity aimed at recent PhD graduates hopes to provide funding and work opportunities to researchers whose careers have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to the pandemic research and teaching at institutions of higher education has been disrupted and the employment prospects of the current cohort of PhD graduates has been severely adversely impacted, according to DARPA.

To help address this issue, DARPA launched this funding opportunity for Post Docs to work on research that could one day help the agency. 

DARPA wants submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in several very specific areas. DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) is providing funding for this opportunity.

This opportunity is specifically focused on supporting research by computer science postdoctoral fellows to drive innovation in these following Topic areas:

• Topic 1: Computational Theory of Insecurity

• Topic 2: Cross-Disciplinary Knowledge Discovery

• Topic 3: Ego-Centric Emotion Recognition

• Topic 4: Multi-Scale Models of Social Dynamics

• Topic 5: Identifying Insecurity in Software of Unknown Provenance

• Topic 6: Calming Advisor to Reduce Conflict Online

• Topic 7: Rethinking Design through Imprecise Specifications

• Topic 8: Software Source of Truth

• Topic 9: Evaluating Generative Common Sense Question Answering

According to DARPA, If left unaddressed, the adverse impacts to Post Docs will result in a shortfall in research-qualified individuals in computer science fields such as cyber security, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, human-machine interaction, social network engineering, and others that are critical to U.S. national security and economic competitiveness. 

This opportunity is intended to mitigate these adverse impacts and enhance the health of the U.S. computer science research workforce moving forward.

Read more HERE

Published by Doug Beizer