DARPA I2O PostDoctoral Fellowship in Computer Sciences
DARPA-RA-21-02
Grants.gov   https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=329795
Required Stage 1 Technical Volume I Due  December 14, 2020

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is issuing this a Research Announcement (RA) inviting submissions of innovative basic or applied research concepts in areas of interest to the Information Innovation Office (I2O) as described below. This I2O RA is specifically focused on supporting research by computer science postdoctoral fellows to drive innovation in these following Topic areas which are described more fully in Section I.E:
• 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

I2O provides this funding opportunity to address challenges to the career planning processes of PhD graduates and the faculty hiring process of U.S. institutions of higher education that are emerging due to the pandemic. Because the pandemic has disrupted research and teaching at institutions of higher education, the employment prospects of the current cohort of PhD graduates has been severely adversely impacted. If left unaddressed, these adverse impacts 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 RA is intended to mitigate these adverse impacts and enhance the health of the U.S. computer science research workforce moving forward.