Emerging Opportunities

- Instantiate and extend methods for high assurance in AI systems of systems to military relevant domains. - Develop a software composition library in support of developing methods for high assurance in AI systems.

- Award FY 2027 cooperative agreements for new two-year research efforts across YFA topic areas, establishing a new set of scientific approaches to solve current DoW challenges. - Continue FY 2026 research on new concepts for microsystem, biological, strategic, and tactical technologies; information innovation; and defense sciences by…

- Integrate automated mathematical techniques in an AI system capable of performing complex mathematical derivations and proofs. - Perform initial demonstrations of mathematical knowledge discovery on mathematical problem domains/sub-domains of particular importance for national security. - Demonstrate math automation capabilities at a…

- Build tools to assist verification of program behavior equivalence in multi-threaded settings. - Scale up tools to translate C programs to safe and correct Rust while ensuring performance of the translation tools.

- Harden MR protection technologies and transition to Department of War (DoW) system development activities and acquisition programs. - Facilitate adoption of MR protection technology by commercial communities to enable broad benefits across US Government, DoW, and civilian sectors.

- Execute collaborative R&D efforts that address critical technical challenges associated with the use of frontier AI for national security. - Coordinate R&D efforts with government activities seeking to use frontier AI for national security applications, systems, and missions.

- Collaborate with transition partners to demonstrate feasibility assessment tools in selected domains of interest.

- Demonstrate that proof explicitly encodes key semantic information that can be mapped to the operational context to enhance the operator's insight. - Develop AI architectures that enable users to enhance system understanding. - Develop test scenarios and proof artifacts and perform test and evaluation within a realistic gaming…

- Construct energy-aware ML and evaluate power usage and performance for a given task.

- Explore techniques to mitigate singularities in mathematical transformations. - Develop tools to detect and mitigate singularities of discovered transformations.

- Enable the automated generation of quantum algorithms with computational quantum advantage over classical computing paradigms. - Develop a domain-agnostic approach to enable accelerating training through logical, Socratic style, specialist AI tutors. - Develop an approach for constructing common shared knowledge bases about science…

- Investigate approaches for enabling cross-platform entanglement across disparate architectures for distributed quantum sensing and computing applications. - Design training for AI experts to profess a given science domain and advance its research and knowledge frontiers. - Enable scientific AI to create useful, communicable…

- Validate computational approaches for quantifying alignment and measuring the impact of alignment on trust of algorithmic decision-makers for complex use cases. - Evaluate an algorithmic decision-maker's ability to align with a reference group of human decision-makers. - Collaborate with military stakeholders to evaluate the utility of…

- Extend eSBOM with additional types of metadata and design use cases that are relevant to both open-source communities and Department of War software factories.

- Complete efforts to expand data science techniques for non-ergodic systems.

- Begin to define neural circuits involved in safe anesthesia effects. - Demonstrate novel actionable molecular targets that contribute to the effects of anesthesia. - Complete computational screens and select hit drug candidates against novel molecular targets. - Initiate novel drug design for molecular targets of anesthesia.

- Demonstrate that developed countermeasures prevent pathogen growth and increase host survival in single fungal and bacterial pathogen exposures in blood following burn trauma. - Demonstrate that countermeasures are non-toxic and do not produce a response from the immune system in the host following burn trauma. - Validate the…

- Integrate and miniaturize neuromodulation and sensing technologies within a single ingestible form factor for closed-loop control. - Further develop, test, and finalize biomarker sensing for identified biomarker(s). - Finalize integration of stimulation modalities (electrical and/or mechanical) to modulate the systemic stress response.

- Generalize computational models by incorporating available data from public protein databases. - Incorporate machine learning methods with physics-based models to provide speed and accuracy of function prediction. - Evaluate the optimized model performance in capability demonstrations to predict molecular function from folding, binding…

- Initiate exploration of approaches to improve assessments and diagnostics for predictive and preventative purposes. - Identify assessment paradigm for biological and artificial intelligence problem solving separately and in tandem. - Investigate high-throughput characterization technologies to examine molecular interactions and…

- Begin pressure tests to experimentally validate simulations for tailored DoW use cases. - Investigate and evaluate new approaches and combinations thereof to develop simulations of fundamental biological processes and responses to stimuli or stress. - Begin validating simulations of fundamental biological processes and responses to…

- Complete data collection of biobehavioral signatures of warfighter and team performance. - Validate bio-behavioral signatures using predictive models of team performance. - Conduct Critical Task Analysis for two additional teaming-related use cases and develop custom metrics for each use case. - Create testbeds for two additional…

- Demonstrate medical countermeasures against pathogenic bacteria and/or their toxins with greater efficacy than state-of-the-art antibiotic therapies.

- Identify molecules in the blood that correspond to sleep loss and its effects on cognitive function. - Identify potential intervention targets for mitigating deleterious effects of sleep loss.

- Demonstrate improved radioisotope yield in generating useful daughter products faster than natural decay processes and show a path to producing practical quantities of radioisotopes. - Complete solid-state reaction rate amplification factor analysis modeling and testing. - Demonstrate ~1000X improvement in solid-state reaction rates.

- Explore potential of complex optimized protocols to produce currently unattainable material properties and desired performance limits. - Refine isotope and trace element analysis capabilities and demonstrate robust and universal analysis capabilities with (sub)-ppm sensitivities. - Develop aerosol materials with high acoustic impedance…

- Develop and assess the capability of an integrated system to produce sufficient microbial biomass powder for 14 warfighters in one day from air, water, electricity, and microbes. - Determine that the microbial biomass powder meets DoW Nutritional Standards for Operational Rations (NSOR) requirement and meets DoW safety and stability…

- Produce final processor designs and performance models for enforcing code compartmentalization policies. - Develop enhanced attack campaign test cases for DoW-relevant applications. - Apply compartmentalization and privilege management tools and processor enforcement mechanism to an application nominated by a DoW partner.

- Demonstrate promising materials, devices, and integration and packaging technologies. - Integrate components to demonstrate sub functions of next-generation artificial intelligence, efficient communication, intelligent storage, novel sensing-to-action, and distributed computing architectures. - Perform research on next generation…

- Examine current and burgeoning technologies for creation of disruptive microtechnologies. - Investigate potential areas for leveraging commercial microsystems scaling for relevant defense applications.