DARPA’s Director Arati Prabhakar on Big Data and Brain Function Research

Apr 29, 2013

Sogeti Labs

On April 16, 2013, Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities. Two topics that Dr. Prabhakar addressed, intrigued me in particular. First, her account of big data capabilities to draw insight from multiple data sources and right thereafter her explanation of DARPA’s Brain function research, including the ethical and societal components. The following text is literally quoted:

Big data capabilities
Exponential improvements in computing power, network bandwidth and storage density combined with ever more pervasive sensing and measurement technologies give us enhanced tools for drawing information and insights from massive, heterogeneous data sets. In the national security realm, harnessing big data offers special challenges. National security often involves actors with a vested interest in remaining unobserved. Data sets may be corrupted, incomplete, or disaggregated to the point that sophisticated technologies are required for cleanup. Data sets may be multimodal, real timestreamed, or on a scale for which storage isn’t feasible and requires new processing approaches.
Moreover, in many national security applications, inferences must be drawn, relationships deduced, or anomalies detected working solely from data sets that are weak proxies for the underlying quantities of interest. The varied ways in which data are gathered pose challenges in fusion. And while the cost of investigating false alarms is often high, the consequences of a missed detection are even greater. These challenges are being addressed across DARPA’s big data portfolio. The effort begins at the basic science level and also addresses fundamental computational issues such as novel algorithm design, natural language processing, and architectures for efficient processing of streamed data. At the other end, DARPA is working closely with national security agencies on operational data to ensure continuous transition of tools as programs progress.

Brain function research
DARPA plans to build on its past and ongoing research to help advance a new understanding of brain function to treat injury, create new brain-machine interfaces, and inspire new algorithms and hardware. Earlier this month the President announced an initiative to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain. DARPA’s brain function research will play an important role in the initiative, with the goal of understanding the dynamic functions of the brain and demonstrating breakthrough applications based on these insights. DARPA aims to develop a new set of tools to capture and process dynamic neural and synaptic activities, and explore ways to dramatically improve the way we diagnose and treat warfighters who are suffering from post-traumatic stress, brain injury and memory loss.

I want to note that we pursue technologies like these because of their promise, but we understand that in this pursuit, we might be working in areas that raise ethical, legal, security, or policy questions. Here, our job is twofold. We must be fearless about exploring new technologies and their capabilities; this is our core function and our Nation is best served if we push these frontiers ahead of other countries. At the same time, we must raise the broader societal questions and engage those who can address them. We ensure our work adheres to laws and regulations. In new and uncharted territory, we reach out to a variety of experts and stakeholders with different points of view. In many instances, technology solutions can be part of the answer to new concerns. But we recognize that at their heart, these are societal questions that require a broader community be engaged as we explore the technological frontier.

Note: The document from which these quotes are taken can be found here: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/AS/AS26/20130416/100657/HHRG-113-AS26-Wstate-PrabhakarA-20130416.pdf

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Sogeti Labs

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