IAO & DARPA NEWS PAGE3

New Threat Detection Capabilities Ready to Test

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2010 - A new system being developed to give helicopter crews a "heads up" when they're being attacked, as well as the shooter's location, is slated to ship to Afghanistan in October to see how it stands up under combat conditions.

A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter equipped with the Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination system undergoes operational testing. The system soon will be deployed to Afghanistan, where troops on the ground will provide feedback on how it performs in combat. DoD photo, courtesy of DARPA (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

The Helicopter Alert and Threat Termination system, being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, promises to warn aircrews of incoming small-arms or machine-gun fire with enough time to take evasive action and launch a counterattack, said Karen Wood, the program manager.

It works by using advanced sensors able to detect the supersonic shock wave or "crack" produced by a bullet in flight and pinpointing its source, she explained.

The program, known as HALTT, taps into technology that Wood's DARPA team already developed for ground vehicles.

The CROSSHAIRS – or Counter Rocket-Propelled Grenade and Shooter System with Highly Accurate Immediate Responses – program aims to develop a threat detection and countermeasure system for light tactical vehicles.

CROSSHAIRS will be able to detect and locate enemy shooters firing threats ranging from bullets to rocket-propelled grenades to anti-tank guided missiles to direct-fired mortars, Wood said. In addition, it will engage the shooters and notify other friendly forces of the threat.

The CROSSHAIRS program builds on yet another DARPA effort: the Boomerang II acoustic gunshot detection system. The vehicle-mounted anti-sniper system "listens" for a bullet's shockwave and muzzle blast and transmits the shooter's location to the vehicle crew – all in less than a second.

Thousands of Boomerang II systems already are in the combat theater, and troops on the ground credit them with high accuracy and few false alarms, Wood said.

Wood got a first-hand report of their effectiveness from a participant at a conference she was attending in San Diego.

"Were you involved in the Boomerang program?" a man asked her. "Well, I just want you to know that it saved my son's life." He went on to share the story of a unit under attack, a bullet that barely missed its target, and how Boomerang engaged before the next bullet hit.

But transferring that capability to helicopters presents new challenges, largely because of aircraft noise that muffles out blasts and rotor blade downwash that plays havoc with supersonic shock waves.

"So technically, this was very, very challenging compared to ground vehicles," Wood said. "You had to think about the problem a little bit differently."

Working closely with the Army and U.S. Special Operations Command, DARPA used Boomerang as a starting point as it went about developing a similar capability for helicopters.

The initial result, a prototype HALTT system, showed great promise when it was put through testing at Fort Rucker, Ala., and Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., Wood reported.

The initial tests were conducted aboard an Army UH-60L Black Hawk, but the testing then extended to a SOCOM MH-47 Chinook to gauge how HALTT technology translates to different air platforms.

During four flight tests at Fort Rucker, "the systems just kept getting better and better," Wood said. HALTT performed so well, in fact, that the military pressed to get Phase 1 prototypes into the combat theater even as DARPA further refines the program. So beginning in October, helicopter crews in Afghanistan will get the capability HALTT provides, as well as a chance to weigh in on its development.

"What will be really helpful for us is that they will be able to use the system, and they'll probably use it in ways that we haven't even thought of. That's certainly what we found to be the case from Boomerang," Wood said.

"We expect them to give us some really good feedback," she continued. "What we're hoping for is to get valuable feedback for this next phase of the program: This is what they like or didn't like, and 'Can you make it do this ... ?' But at the same time, they will have a capability there that they simply never had before."

Meanwhile, Wood's team will incorporate this feedback while moving into the second phase of the HALTT development program.

Among the things they'll explore are ways to make the system more effective when the helicopter is hovering and generates the heaviest rotor wash, to overcome extra noise from dual-rotor aircraft, and to use existing helicopter display panels to convey alert warnings to aircrews.

In addition, plans call for more vigorous in-air testing when HALTT is installed in a Maverick unmanned aerial vehicle.

Wood praised cooperation between the Army, Socom and DARPA that's enabled the program to advance so quickly. "They have really stepped up and done an incredible job," she said. "The program has proceeded rapidly compared to a normal acquisition program."

Regina Dugan, DARPA's director, quantified the program's pace during congressional testimony in March. "From funding allocation to live-fire test completion, this effort took an unprecedented five months, and will be fielded in less than a year from identification of the need," she told a House Armed Services subcommittee.

But beyond the development timeline, Dugan expressed particular enthusiasm about the new capabilities HALTT, as well as CROSSHAIRS, will bring to warfighters on the ground. Both systems "promise to make it very dangerous to shoot at U.S. forces," she said, "because the first shot may well be the adversary's last."
 

DARPA Effort Speeds Biothreat Response

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2, 2010 - Spurred by the 21st century's first flu pandemic, the Defense Department has developed new, faster ways to make vaccines that could save lives around the world.

Each well in the MIMIC system's 96-well plastic plate represents a human immune system. The MIMIC system's highly sensitive functional assays simulate a clinical trial for a diverse population without ever putting human subjects at risk. Photo by Todd Lemoine, courtesy of VaxDesign (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

New vaccine technologies not only will speed the U.S. government response to infectious diseases, but also will give officials better options for fighting bioterror attacks, a DOD scientist said.

A month before the World Health Organization declared H1N1 a pandemic virus in June 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had a plan to address the crisis. The DARPA effort, called Blue Angel, has been working since May 2009 to develop a surge capacity for flu viruses.

Although the swine-origin H1N1 virus turned out to be fatal only for a small percentage of those infected, "the need to demonstrate a response to an urgent situation hasn't changed," Army Col. (Dr.) Alan Magill, a program manager in DARPA's defense sciences office, told American Forces Press Service.

"We've used H1 as an example, a proof of concept," he said. "We hope these technologies that are established will move on to address other issues besides influenza."

Eighteen months and $100 million later, Blue Angel and the companies it funds have created new technologies for developing, testing and quickly mass-producing new vaccines.

For the largest program, called AMP for Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals, companies in four states are building facilities where they can quickly produce vaccine-grade proteins grown in the cells of tobacco plants. Once they produce the proteins, the goal is for each company to scale up its process to produce 100 million doses of H1N1 flu vaccine per month. Existing vaccine manufacturers worldwide produce a fraction of that -- about 300 million doses of vaccine in six months, Magill said.

Vaccines are produced in steps, beginning with getting a sample of the active virus. From the original virus, "seeds" are used to grow the virus in hundreds of millions of chicken eggs -- a time-consuming process developed more than 50 years ago. After the virus particles are grown, they're purified to make vaccine.

AMP set out to speed up the process by looking at a range of animals and plants whose cells could produce high-quality proteins that would work well in people, Magill said. What emerged from the first round of experiments were tobacco plants.

"Think about walking through the woods on a rainy day. You walk through on Tuesday and there's nothing there, and you take the same walk on Wednesday and suddenly there's a mushroom that's a foot high and it grew overnight," Magill said.

"Anything in nature that produces a tremendous amplification of biomass was of interest," he added. "Clearly these weeds -- that's really what tobacco plants are -- grow very fast, and that's what we captured."

Plants with the fastest-growing cells will be able to produce more proteins in a shorter time for vaccines, he explained.

Four companies are working to transform protein-producing tobacco plants from a proof of concept to a demonstration of the capability. The next step will be to develop full industrial processes for producing the proteins.

The companies are Fraunhofer USA Center for Molecular Biotechnology in Delaware, Kentucky Bioprocessing in Owensboro, a consortium called Project GreenVax, whose partners are the Texas A&M University system and a Texas company called G-Con, and Medicago USA in North Carolina.

"They're all using tobacco plants, and there's a little variation on the theme," Magill said. "But the approaches -- what do you put in the plants, how do you infect the plant cells, what kind of vectors [carriers] do you use, what is the nature of the protein, how is it purified -- all of these are actually quite different."

The companies all are making progress, he said. One of them, Fraunhofer, already has a product in Phase 1 clinical trials -- the first stage of testing in people.

"The final trial will go on for six months, because we have to do safety monitoring," Magill said. "But we'll know whether the technology worked probably about the end of January."

Another Blue Angel project is a technology called Modular Immune In Vitro Constructs, or MIMIC, which Magill calls "an immune system in a test tube." DARPA created MIMIC to quickly test new vaccines for safety and effectiveness.

Pharmaceutical companies that produce candidate vaccines initially don't actually know if the drug will improve a person's immunity or will be safe when administered. That's why in the United States the Food and Drug Administration requires companies to hold a series of clinical trials before drugs are approved for market.

As a pharmaceutical company with a candidate vaccine, Magill said, "all I can do is commit to a Phase 3 [effectiveness] study in which I will have to enroll 10,000 people over the course of about three years in order to ... show that my new vaccine in this case would be as good as the traditional egg-based vaccine.

"So 10,000 people, three years, $100 million," he said.

An alternative may be MIMIC, a DARPA technology developed by Florida-based biotechnology company VaxDesign Corp.

Each of MIMIC's 128--by-85-millimeter plastic plates contains 96 tiny wells filled with mixtures of human immune cells and biological molecules. Each well represents a human immune system.

The system can predict the effectiveness of vaccine additives called adjuvants and molecules that the immune system recognizes called antigens, VaxDesign officials said, adding that it can predict dosing, dose timing and cross-protection against other viral strains; determine the potency of stockpiled vaccines; and compare the effects of different manufacturing methods on vaccine potency.

"It's a very clever technology," Magill said. "I can look at the immune responses in the MIMIC system and tell you that this is going to work, this is going to protect patients, they're not going to get sick and it's going to be really safe."

In September, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine division of the Lyon, France-based Sanofi-Aventis Group, signed a binding agreement to buy VaxDesign for $60 million.

The full potential of MIMIC -- to take the place of clinical trials -- could take years to realize. But Magill said he has confidence in the technology.

"Where this will be useful is in what we call the downselect -- when you're in the business and you've got five vaccine candidates and you're not sure which one is going to work," he said. Today, to downselect the best candidate a company would have to do a year-long Phase 1 study for each candidate that would cost $5 million to $78 million per trial. "But what if I can just replace all that by going into MIMIC up front?" Magill said.

"Let's say I spend $1 million in MIMIC, but I get the answer in two months and that predicts the vaccine that I need to take into humans," he said. "That's huge. And I think the likelihood of that occurring is pretty high."

MIMIC will work in parallel with AMP to test candidate H1N1 vaccines, Magill said, and both will complement other projects that also are part of Blue Angel.

Technologies developed for Blue Angel eventually will apply to a range of flu viruses and other diseases, Magill added.

"Blue Angel's vaccine portfolio alone has generated four facilities, four [technical] approaches, two clinical trials, two [FDA investigational new drug applications], the MIMIC and a variety of other spinoff technologies," he said, adding that it could take a decade to commercialize the technology.

Such an outcome for plant-based vaccines would be amazing, he said.

"We don't see very often that a response like this essentially creates a new industry. But we'll see," Magill said. "You still have to go through clinical trials ... and work through all the issues. But I would say initially things are quite pleasing and somewhat promising."

DOD Center Tracks Health, Illness in U.S. Forces

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2010 - A new Defense Department agency employs combined medical expertise to track health, illness and injury across the military services, the center director said.

Army Col. (Dr.) Robert F. DeFraites heads the Maryland-based American Forces Health Surveillance Center, which serves servicemembers, family members, deployed civilian workers, beneficiaries and retirees.

"The mission is to be the strategic-level public health surveillance agency for the Department of Defense, almost ... a very small version of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control for the DOD," DeFraites told American Forces Press Service.

"We are a central resource for epidemiology, which is the study of health and disease in populations," he said.

The center does its work through three divisions, including Data and Analysis and Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response Systems Operations, called GEIS operations.

The Army Medical Surveillance Activity, for many years recognized as the DOD center for deployment surveillance, became the heart of the new center's data and analysis division, DeFraites said.

"A doctor or nurse might monitor a patient by taking a temperature and vital signs. In public health we do the same thing but for people in a community," he said.

Such public health surveillance involves accumulating statistics on rates of illnesses and injuries across a population, monitoring the trends and taking the information to those who can act on it if necessary.

The data comes from pre- and post-deployment health assessments of those who enter the military services, and from the military health system and the Tricare medical network.

"We combine that with information on what we call demographics -- rank, age, marital status, race -- and then we associate that with who's injured or ill, and their immunization status."

The division operates the following systems:

-- The Defense Medical Surveillance System, a growing database of health-related information on servicemembers collected from the time they enter military service until they are no longer eligible for care.

-- The Defense Medical Epidemiology Database, which gives users around the world access to anonymous data from the Defense Medical Surveillance System.

-- The DOD Serum Repository, established in 1989 for routine HIV testing, is the world's largest serum repository with nearly 50 million specimens from 11 million individuals.

Just as military populations do their work worldwide, the center has an international reach through its GEIS operations, DeFraites said.

GEIS was created in 1997 by a presidential directive that expanded the role of federal agencies, including DOD, to improve domestic and international infectious disease surveillance, prevention and response.

In 2008, GEIS became part of the American Forces Health Surveillance Center. GEIS has partner laboratories in North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia.

"Our key partners internationally are the overseas Army and Navy laboratories," DeFraites said, including the U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Kenya, the Naval Medical Research Unit 3 in Cairo, Egypt, and the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Landstuhl, Germany.

GEIS began global disease surveillance in 1997 with very modest funding, Navy Capt. (Dr.) Kevin Russell, director of GEIS operations, told American Forces Press Service.

"It came at an opportune time for the overseas labs because they had never been given funding that was flexible enough to tend to the needs of the local communities" that hosted them, Russell said.

The labs were in place -- originally in Egypt, Indonesia, Peru and Thailand -- for strict force-health protection and military research and development, Russell said.

With new funding the labs began to perform vaccine, antibiotic and anti-parasitic trials that have benefited host country and military populations.

Today, as part of the health surveillance center, GEIS is a $50-million-a-year program that coordinates projects in 80 countries and has more than 500 collection sites.

GEIS partner labs located worldwide have a record of success. Two GEIS-funded laboratories in the United States identified the first four cases of pandemic flu in 2009 and reported them to CDC. GEIS labs conducted global emerging infection surveillance and response efforts with 39 partners in 111 countries.

The laboratories expanded the DOD global flu surveillance program to 72 countries, 20 Navy ships, one foreign ship and six clinics along the Mexican border. They also serve as a primary resource for global avian flu surveillance worldwide.

In some countries U.S. military laboratories work with the host nation's ministry of health; in others, the ministry of defense, Russell said.

In each country an important role for the labs is to build the capacity of laboratories and technicians to monitor, detect and report to the World Health Organization outbreaks of diseases like flu that could affect people around the world.

The International Health Regulations, revised in 2005 and in effect in 2007, help guide the work of capacity building to allow countries to meet their obligations under the regulations, Russell said. The regulations describe the roles of each country's government agencies, including military agencies, to participate in public health surveillance and outbreak response.

"It's a very dynamic time right now in global biosurveillance," Russell said. "From the president's national strategy to counter biological threats ... to the International Health Regulations, we have a lot of responsibility in the DOD to be a leader in this field."

Because national government military and civilian surveillance programs are expanding, from the CCD's Global Disease Detection program to the Defense Threat Reduction Program and others, "there are a lot of challenges for all of us in how to work together," he said.

The future role of GEIS, Russell added, should be to concentrate on the military-to-military piece of disease surveillance and capacity building.

A recent meeting hosted by the American Forces Health Surveillance Center in St. Petersburg, Russia, on emerging infectious diseases and the role of militaries under the International Health Regulations, drew representatives from the medical departments of 43 different militaries throughout the world, Russell said.

"We need to continue working with militaries throughout the world, doing capacity building, sample collection, laboratory processing with them more and more," Russell said, "as the Department of State and other agencies work with the civilian sector."
 

Warfighters to Get Improved 'Eyes in the Sky'

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16, 2010 - Warfighters in Afghanistan will get an unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground in the coming months with the initial deployment of a new ultra-high-resolution camera able to scan a wide field of view and download images in real time.

The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System demonstrates is surveillance capabilities during a November 2009 test at Quantico, Va. Courtesy photo (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Defense Department's high-tech research and development arm, is working with the Army to deploy its new Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System program during the first half of 2011, program manager Brian Leininger told American Forces Press Service.

The ARGUS-IS system, with an acronym that recalls the 100-eyed Greek mythological figure, will give ground troops a persistent "eyes in the sky" capability that improves their ability to identify and track targets of interest and enemy operatives.

The heart of the system is a 1.8-gigapixel color camera, the largest video sensor ever used to conduct tactical missions.

To provide a sense of just how high-resolution this sensor is, Leininger compared it to a standard cell phone camera. A cell phone image typically runs between 1 million and 2 million pixels. With ARGUS-IS, it's 900 to 1,800 times that number –- enough to track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet.

But ARGUS-IS offers more than just high-resolution imagery. To be deployed on an A-160 "Hummingbird" unmanned aerial platform, it will be able to scan almost 25 square miles.

This represents a big technological leap over current airborne surveillance systems, Leininger said. Those that deliver high-resolution images are limited to very small fields of view, he explained, and those covering broader areas provide low-resolution imagery.

In addition, ARGUS-IS operators on the ground can designate "windows" around up to 65 specific sites or targets they want to monitor. They can choose buildings, road intersections or other fixed locations the system will "stare" at, or people or vehicles to trail –- even if they're moving in different directions.

"And if you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, 'Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four?'" Leininger said. "They can say, 'I will follow all of them, simultaneously and automatically.'"

ARGUS-IS's processing system compresses the massive amount of data collected to what's most valuable to warfighters, such as movement or changes on the ground. Then it transmits this data to operations centers and troops operating in the area in multiple, real-time video streams at the rate of 10 frames per second.

DARPA, working in partnership with the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory and National Geospatial Agency, conducted its first test flights using the ARGUS system last year. For those tests, the system's sensor and airborne processing unit were slung in a pod under a special UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and a fixed-wing DC-8 aircraft.

Now scientists are integrating the system into the Hummingbird platform, which can fly at up to 20,000 feet for 12 hours or more, for deployment to Afghanistan.

Even before ARGUS-IS reaches the field, DARPA already is looking ahead to the next step in its evolution. A contract awarded this past summer is funding a program to integrate an infrared capability that will enable the system to operate at night.

Leininger, who started the ARGUS-IS program just over three years ago, said the increased intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance capability the system will provide will help ground troops carry out their missions and save lives in the process.

"This is a very useable system that will provide an enormous [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] multiplier for the troops," he said. "It gives them a new and better way to see what is around them with a big eye in the sky."
 

Partners Build High-tech Hands for Wounded Warriors

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15, 2010 - Top scientists and technologists are working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to give arms and hands back to warriors who lose them in battle.

Users wear and control, without surgery, an advanced prosthetic arm developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program in 2007. Courtesy photo (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available.

Army Col. (Dr.) Geoffrey Ling, the DARPA program manager, talked about the program Nov. 19 to a TEDx Pentagon audience. TEDx Pentagon is a military-focused speaker series.

"When you lose the arm anywhere along its course, you also lose the hand," Ling said. And this hand is truly remarkable -- it is the most complex biological tool that exists in nature today."

Even at the finest hospitals in America today, the solution to a missing hand usually is a hook, Ling said, "because making a hand is thought to be impossible."

"But is it?" he asked. Not if you work at DARPA, he said.

Ling said that during his first deployment to Afghanistan in 2003, he was frustrated by being able to help patients survive, but not to completely restore them to health, especially if they had lost limbs, eyesight or brain function.

When Ling returned from Afghanistan, he was invited to join DARPA. "And let me tell you, it is a magical place," he said. "The leaders there are visionaries. They exhort us daily to challenge what is commonly held to be impossible and instead look at it as possible -- and if so, make it probable."

DARPA officials put out a challenge, he said: Make us a hand that looks like a hand, works like a hand and has the performance characteristics of a hand, and that lets the wearer control it naturally, with the brain.

"Most of the engineers thought we were crazy," he said. "That's good; it means we're on the right track. But a number of them were crazy enough to come work with us."

The challenge included an ambitious timetable.

"We have the most worthy patients waiting for it," Ling said he told the scientists, "so you don't have five or 10 or 20 years. You've got two years ... to go from idea to making the thing work."

DARPA decided to divide the program into two parts. One group would build the finest mechanical arm they could. The second would build an arm-hand combination controlled by the brain.

"To get that interface, from brain control to body to arm, that's a little tough," Ling said he told the second group. "So we'll give you four years."

Today, the agency's Revolutionizing Prosthetics program is entering its fifth year, and nearly $150 million is committed to improving the entire upper-limb prosthetic system, including sockets and control software.

By 2008, DEKA Integrated Solutions Corp. had built two generations of a "strap-and-go" arm-hand system that users could wear and control without surgery. Six users helped them assess the prototypes in clinical studies, and clinical and take-home trial subjects logged more than 3,000 hours of use on the second-generation DEKA arm. Trials included 26 participants in a Veterans Affairs Department study that used the DEKA arm in three VA medical centers and the Center for the Intrepid at Brooke Army Medical Center in Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

DEKA plans to finish building its first third-generation system early next year for more VA and Defense Department trials. The arm has 10 powered degrees of motion and six user-selectable hand grips.

It looks like an arm and works like an arm, Ling said, but operates using "local control."

"As you turn, it turns; you lean forward, it comes out; you stand up, it goes back in the same way your arm does," Ling explained. "It has a local mechanical control, so when you grab a cup, for example, your hand conforms around it. ... It's fully modular -- you lose a hand, we'll give you a hand. You lose your arm below the elbow, we'll give you a hand and a forearm, ... all the way up to the shoulder. And it's available today."

DEKA is applying for Food and Drug Administration permission to market the arm and is negotiating with commercial partners that eventually will sell the modular systems.

"It's a wonderful thing -- great, great, great," Ling said. "But not nearly good enough, because in the end, that is not full restoration. To do that, we've got to get into the brain."

Over the first four years of the second DARPA effort -- to build a hand controlled by the brain -- scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory went through three mechanical designs and gained insight from more than 100 hours of use by six trial participants.

The Modular Prosthetic Limb had 17 controlled degrees of motion at the end of the lab's Phase 2 contract. In June, DARPA awarded a Phase 3 contract so the lab's scientists can finish developing brain implants that could provide near-natural control of the system.

The program inspired the National Institutes of Health to sponsor a challenge for brain control of the advanced arms. Ling said this part of the program has galvanized "every leading neuroscientist in the United States, all the big labs, to be involved in the project. With the help of our friends at [the National Institutes of Health], we have cornered the market."

Together, the scientists have developed "a little brain interface device, ... half the size of your pinky nail, that lays on the surface of the brain and captures brain signals associated with movement of your arms as you're doing a task," Ling said.

"We've learned how to decode those signals such that it can work an arm," he added. "We've already got primates doing this."

Other partners include the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has followed program developments to inform standards for medical robots. Several Army representatives act as advisors and the FDA helps DARPA officials navigate regulatory requirements.

The new hand has five independent, moving fingers and a rotating thumb. Sensors in the fingers let wearers feel what they touch. Vibration sensors in the joints allow them to feel movement. Temperature sensors allow them to feel hot and cold.

Now, Ling said, DARPA and the Johns Hopkins lab are ready to identify patients who will test the new modular arms.

"These are patients who have had spinal-cord injuries, so they are unable to move from the neck down. They have no function of the arms or legs," he said. "Well, we're going to give them an arm."

DARPA intends to have the Johns Hopkins lab run two clinical sites through 2013 to gain data on brain control of the arm prostheses. The clinical sites are seeking regulatory approval for devices they will implant in patients to decode motor signals that will move the arm and hand.

"What we're going to do is ... put the chip in and then couple it up to this remarkable arm," Ling said. "What we expect patients to be able to do is all the activities of daily living, such as eating and the like, but also work a keyboard.

"If they can play Chopin on the piano, let them play Chopin," he continued. "If they can work needlepoint and I give them an iPhone, let them have it. That's in six months. In 18 months, I'm going to give somebody two arms because, in the end, I want these patients to be able to lift themselves and roll around in wheelchairs."

The goal is to gain FDA approval to market the modular prosthetic limbs and to use implantable arrays in others who have lost control of their upper limbs, especially amputees and stroke victims.
"Think about what this technology can do for stroke victims, Parkinson's victims [and] spinal-cord victims, of course," Ling said. The elderly also can benefit, he said.

"Why can't the 90-year-old man go out back and play tennis again?" he asked. "Why can't the 80-year-old woman go to her great-grandson's wedding, not in some stinking wheelchair and a diaper, but go there to dance with her grandson?

"These are all within the realm of possibility," he added. "In fact, they're within the realm of probability."

DARPA Goal for Cybersecurity: Change the Game

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20, 2010 - Self-proclaimed "technogeeks" at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, after determining the nature of the cybersecurity threat, have devised programs to tackle the problem and, most importantly, surprise their adversaries, DARPA's deputy director said.

Kaigham "Ken" Gabriel spoke here at the Dec. 16 Cyber Security Forum, sponsored by The Atlantic and Government Executive magazines, and afterward spoke with American Forces Press Service.

He said the agency's sole mission since its inception in 1958 has been to prevent and create technology surprises. Two of the agency's recent cybersecurity programs, called CRASH and PROCEED, were created for that purpose.

CRASH, the Clean-slate Design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts program, seeks to build new computer systems that resist cyberattacks. After successful attacks they would adapt, learn from the attack and repair themselves, Gabriel said.

CRASH evolved from a workshop DARPA held earlier this year where they pulled together cybersecurity and operating-system experts and infectious-disease biologists, he said.

"The first couple of hours, someone who was there described it as being like a junior high school dance," he added. "All the biologists were on one side of the room, the computer scientists on the other. Finally one of them walked over and began talking, and they all started mixing."

Some interesting ideas came out of the workshop, Gabriel said. One was that biology starts from the supposition that attackers -- bacteria or viruses -- will get through the body's defenses. The body doesn't even try to stop them; biology just deals with it.

The body doesn't care how many times things get in, he added. And bodies are genetically diverse; viruses or bacteria that infect one body won't necessarily infect all the others, or infect them in the same way.

This concept applies to computer vulnerabilities because most computer hardware is built the same way, Gabriel said.

"The idea is to look at the structure of computers, which are identical and have no security in the hardware ... because performance was king 15 or 20 years ago," he said. "Transistors and computer performance were precious and you didn't give up any of it to security. Now, the world is different."

Today, security could be added to computer hardware, giving computers a sort of genetic diversity that would make them less vulnerable to cyber infections.

Getting such new, more robust hardware architecture into the market will take some time, Gabriel said, noting that the reason for programs like CRASH is to create something he calls convergence between cyberthreats and cybersecurity.

To analyze the problem of convergence, DARPA compared the number of lines of source code written over 20 years in security software and the number of lines of code in malware written over the same period.

Over 20 years, he said, the lines of code in security software increased from about 10,000 to 10 million lines. The number of lines of code in malware was surprisingly constant at about 125 lines.

This analysis and others "led us to understand that many of the things we're doing are useful, but they're not convergent with the problem," Gabriel said. "We're never going to catch up [with malware], so how do we change the game? How do we essentially create surprise for our adversaries in this challenge area?"

Along with CRASH, another way is PROCEED, or Programming Computation on Encrypted Data, he said.

"Encryption is one way of protecting things, but if you want to operate on encrypted data -- process it, do something with it -- you have to decrypt it first. You operate on it while it's in a decrypted state, then take your result, encrypt that again and send it on," Gabriel said.

For the past 20 or 30 years, people have been debating about whether it's possible to do operations on encrypted data without decrypting it first.

"It was considered to be such a difficult problem that people were mathematically trying to prove it couldn't be done," he said. "Then, about a year and a half ago, someone proved that it could be done. That's the good news. The bad news is, it's very inefficient right now -- 12 orders of magnitude less efficient than it needs to be."

PROCEED is working to improve that efficiency, he said.

"If we were able to do relevant sorts of operations without ever having to decrypt, that would be a tremendous gain because ... whenever you decrypt into the open, you create vulnerability," Gabriel said.

Convergence is the objective of both programs, he added. "They are aggressive programs; they may or may not be successful. That's the nature of DARPA. But we have high hopes."
 

Agency Harnesses Technology to Aid Defense Interests

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, March 2, 2011 - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has revamped financial processes, cut contract-award time, transformed the way it chooses investments and supported Afghanistan operations with leading-edge technology over the past year, DARPA's director said here yesterday.

In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on emerging threats and capabilities, Regina E. Dugan called the period "one of vision paired with execution."

Speed is part of the vibrancy of innovation, Dugan said, and the absence of bureaucracy is "a brand attribute of DARPA."

"In the last year," she told the subcommittee, "our contracting time has been reduced by 20 percent, and by September, improved execution had put $600 million more to work for defense and in the economy than in any of the five years prior."

DARPA's singular mission is creating and preventing strategic surprise, Dugan said, noting that this can take a decade, or it can happen in 90 days.

"This spectrum is revealed most vividly in our support to operations in Afghanistan," she said.

Within 90 days, Dugan said, a sustained DARPA effort yielded advances in computation techniques. Three weeks later, a group of analysts traveled to International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Afghanistan, setting up a forward operating cell.

Three months later, a light-detection and ranging system five years in the making was providing three-dimensional maps to users on the battlefield. "LIDAR" systems use light to image objects in the same way that radar systems use radio waves.

The high-altitude LIDAR operational experiment system, called HALOE, can collect data more than 10 times faster than state-of-the-art systems or 100 times faster than conventional systems, Dugan told the panel.

"At full operational capacity, the HALOE system can map 50 percent of Afghanistan in 90 days," the director said, "whereas previous systems would have required three years."

The real challenge at DARPA is not generating ideas but choosing from among them, Dugan said, using manufacturing as an example.

"To address this challenge, we have developed several deeply quantitative analytic frameworks," she said. "Through them, we ask, where are the opportunities to effect changes not in the margins, but in big, bold strokes. The time required to design, test and build complex defense systems has grown from two years to more than 10. We simply must improve our ability to make things."

DARPA officials are trying to bring technological and efficiency leaps in manufacturing –- such as those realized in semiconductors, software and protein production -- to defense systems, Dugan said, with the goal of compressing the time it takes to field military ground vehicles by a factor of five.

"There is no issue more fundamental to the nation's defense and competitiveness than this," Dugan said, "because to innovate we must make, and to protect we must produce."

Noting another key area that has DARPA's attention, Dugan said current approaches to cybersecurity are divergent with an evolving threat. "This calls for aggressive [research and development]," she added, "and we are stepping up to the challenge."

Over the past 20 years, security software has increased from thousands of lines of code to more than 10 million lines of code, Dugan told the subcommittee.

"It's like being in the ocean and treading water," Dugan said. "You must, but if that's all you do, eventually you will drown."

Needing new options, the director said, DARPA recruited an expert team, increased its investment and launched several new initiatives. The agency is investing more than $250 million in cyber initiatives in 2012, a 100 percent increase over the fiscal 2011 cyber budget request, she added.

Beginning in 2012, she said, the president's budget request includes another $500 million for cyber research over the course of the Future Year Defense Program.