DARPA Young Faculty Award YFA : Physical Sciences, Bioengineering, Machine Learning, Materials, Mathematics, Engineering, Computing, Manufacturing relevant to Defense Sciences Office
DARPA-RA-21-01
Grants.gov  https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=329291
betaSam.gov   https://beta.sam.gov/opp/aabf37db17b949b88494684292eb854e/view
Executive Summary Due Date: October 26, 2020.
Full Proposal Due Date: January 8, 2021

Eligibility:  Participation in the YFA program is limited to any current tenure-track Assistant or Associate Professors and to tenured Assistant or Associate Professors within three (3) years of their tenure appointment at a U.S. institution of higher education or equivalent at a U.S. non-profit science and technology research institution, or an equivalent at a non-profit research institution within 12 years of the receipt of their Ph.D. 
Topic areas:

1. Cutting the Cold Chain C3 - Development and transportation of temperature sensitive biomolecules, including vaccines and reagents, requires a dedicated supply chain typically referred to as a “cold-chain.
2. Infectious Disease Detection of Individuals at Facility Ingress.
3. Musculoskeletal Injury-associated Microbiomes or microbial metabolites.
4. Spike Plus: Innovative Models of Neural Computation and Control - develop computational neuroscience models that can leverage the neural code beyond spikes to improve the information processing and computational capacity of neural control systems.
5. Developing a Molecular Strategy to Control Invasive Plant Species that Impede Logistics.
6. Broadband, Efficient Upconversion with 2D Material Platforms - investigate methods to achieve broadband, efficient upconversion from IR bands to visible photons in 2D material platforms. Methods to enhance the efficiency or bandwidth of such upconversion processes by utilizing novel interactions with spin- or phonon-interactions are of interest.
7. Analogical Decision Planning - investigate the computation frameworks in reinforcement learning that permit the “deep transfer” of task knowledge in order to improve the ability of autonomous systems to operate with greater flexibility in novel environments and with modified task goals.
8. Multifunctional Molecular Networks - envision a new materials approach to transcend traditional materials tradeoffs, such as mechanical vs. functional performance, based on designer molecular frameworks such as 2-dimensional polymers (2DPs).
9. Extreme Photon Sensing - seeking proposals for nano-crystalline semiconductor photon sensors for energies ranging from sub-eV to MeV. Of specific interest are detectors sensitive to low or high photon energies in the following regions: mid and long wave infrared, hard x-rays, and gamma rays.
10. Lessons in Asymmetric Adversarial Reasoning (LiAAR) - nterested in developing game-theoretic methods that can be applied to military decision-making in domains in which use of various types of deception is a key characteristic.
11. Analysis of Corporate Access, Ownership, and Control - seek proposals for a framework of universal identification of public and nonpublic corporations (and related organizations) and natural persons acting in a corporate role. Proposed approaches should include designs for compliance with current and foreseeable privacy laws and regulations and for seamless integration with the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) framework (which currently applies primarily to financial firms and some of their customers). DARPA is particularly interested in approaches that develop and apply advanced information technologies based on graph theory, topology, formal semantics, and related computational approaches for modeling and understanding complex contractual networks.
12. A Unified Theoretical and Computational Framework for Narratives in Information Operations - seek a unified framework for conceptualizing a narrative of Information Operations IO that integrates across the many bodies of theoretical work, including anthropology, folkloristics, narratology, linguistics, psychology, marketing, and artificial intelligence, among others.
13. Analyzing Differential Privacy Misuse - interested in scalable techniques to detect the misuse of differential privacy technology. Misuse includes the ability to re-identify or reconstruct data despite differential privacy protections, issues of fairness of the outcome of differential privacy applications (e.g., misallocation, amplification of already biased input data), and gaps between technical security provided and user intuition of security.
14. Effective Hardware Supported Monitoring of Software - seek innovative theories and technologies of software trustworthiness monitoring that take advantage of modern CPU capabilities, combine low performance overhead with comprehensive and provable guarantees of specified expected behavior, and aid the programmer in designing comprehensive runtime security policies that are effective against the known state-of-the-art software exploitation methods.
15. Robot Adaptation as Living Creatures - understand how more complex systems that represent real-world operation of robots in industry could respond creatively, as in robotics assembly line capable of shifting tasking.
16. Ferroelectric Material for FerroElectronic Devices.
17. Ultra-Wide Bandgap Material and Radio Frequency Device Technology.
18. Electroluminescent-Based Coolers Approaching Carnot Limit - develop innovative approaches to achieving very high efficiency light emitting diode LEDs as part of an electroluminescent cooler able to cool to 240K, demonstrating 30 per cent of Carnot efficiency at 10 mW/cm2. Proposers should identify the materials and device description, the operating temperature range, and the luminescence efficiency the device will achieve. infrared detectors
19. Topologically-enhanced Reconfigurable Optoelectronics - seeks to develop innovative, topologically-enhanced, reconfigurable optoelectronic materials and devices with 10x stronger electro-optical effects, 10x improvements in the intrinsic electro-optical absorption modulation efficiency, and 2x longer reconfigurable operating wavelength range than state-of-the-art optoelectronics.
20. Materials and Interconnect Approaches for 3D Heterogeneous Integration for Millimeter Wave Arrays.
21. Acoustic Sensing with Electro-momentum Coupling
22. Access to Networks with Machine Learning (ANML).
23. Lithography-free Integrated Photonics.
24. Extension of Hypersonic Sonic Boom Theory to Include Lift Components.
25. Unique Robotics Using Flexible Films with Embedded Actuators.
26. Energy Web Dominance - novel power beaming modalities and high-efficiency receiver conversion technologies that are compatible with the constrained size and weight requirements of many energy beaming applications.
27. Novel Methods for High-Rate, Short-Duration Force Measurement - aerodynamic measurements in harsh conditions.