5 ms·

I've been funded by DARPA in one way or another and DARPA is not big science. DARPA is an applied R&D agency, meaning they want to see a path from what you are

by munin 10y ago

I've been funded by DARPA in one way or another and DARPA is not big science. DARPA is an applied R&D agency, meaning they want to see a path from what you are talking about to some broad application, preferably in the military space. If you can't describe that path to them, the odds of getting funded by them are low (this is drawn from experience of winning more than 10mil in funding from DARPA on many different programs). The DARPA model is also not big science because the researchers on the outside do not pick the problems, the PMs at DARPA do. The model works when a visionary becomes a PM and is given a "big" (20-80 mil) bucket of money to disperse to researchers to enact their big ideas. If the PMs are truly visionary, then this works. If they are not, you wind up with a sort of soup of crap. Additionally, since it's applied, DARPA will do frequent (once a quarter and once a year) check-ins, measurements, and progress reports. If you don't measure up during those, your funding gets cut. So as a researcher, it is a challenge if what you want to do is a little bit off the path of what the PM wants to do. I have much more limited exposure to IARPA but it seems to be the same way there. I have more experience with NSF, which is the total opposite: researchers propose their own projects and there are infrequent touchpoints, and no cut points really. However, NSF will give you one to two orders of magnitude less money than DARPA.

samstave 10y ago
Gosh, this is an interesting thread... Request: can you give an AMA on how one actually proposes/gets funding from darpa or at least an ELI5 on the topic... What sort of idea should one have where you say to yourself "gee, I should hit up darpa with this!"
- munin 10y ago
  Honestly there is a truth and a super-truth, to use theater terms. The truth, is that you should look at the Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) that DARPA, specifically the Information Innovation Office (I2O) makes. There will be big PDFs that have lots of boiler plate and look really boring, but these are basically documents written by a program manager (PM) that describes what their envisioned research program is, how they see it being divided up, and what kind of researchers they see doing work in each area of their research program. A research program is split up into one of many (between 3 and 8) technical areas (TA) and there will be language in the BAA describing how many TAs one performer might propose to. Overall a TA can be described at a high level as one of a few roles: a blue team, a red team, and a white team. There will usually be more than one blue team, at most one red team, and precisely one white team. A blue team does the R&D on the program. Each blue team can have their own unique approach to addressing the research challenges laid out by the PM. Usually the blue teams have competing or complimentary approaches, it is seen as a waste of money to pay two blue teams to do exactly the same thing. A red team evaluates the work done by the blue team. Exactly what this means depends on what the blue team builds. The white team "holds the room together" by fitting the PMs vision together with what the blue team does. The white team usually has a much closer relationship with the PM and usually the white team is pre-determined by the time the BAA is made public. Blue teams are usually teams of 2-4 companies / universities. These teams usually form before a BAA comes out due to people "in the know" getting a rumor about an upcoming program, or just after it comes out, based on prior relationships. It's kind of rare to have a blue team that is only one entity, but depending on the entity and the size of the program, it can happen. The path to a successful proposal is demonstrating that your team has ideas that are relevant to the PM and that you can successfully execute them. You show this by having a stack of prior work, good ideas, and a well formed and coherent proposal. Think of the proposal as an audition - if you as a team can't get it together for a month and write a 30 page document describing what you want to do, you probably can't keep it together for 4 years working on something. Your team reads the BAA, does some analysis, figures out how your ideas and past work can apply to the research program proposed by the BAA, and then you write the story up. If you do a good job, and your story is more compelling than other people, you get the money. The super-truth is that it's an old boys club with a lot of luck and nepotism. The way people get "in" is when their peers go to DARPA to be a PM. Then you, the researcher, can think "Well Dr. Smith knows about X and likes X+Y, I do some Y, I have an idea that could use some funding, what would Dr. Smith like to read about." Then you write it up and e-mail it to them. Luck is a big factor here because PMs get e-mails like this all the time. It's almost essential to already be in the PMs rolodex/friend group to get some of their cycles. They like to say that they want to have people outside their circle approach them with new ideas but that's kind of a white lie, there are lots of people in the world and a finite amount of the PMs time.
  - itchyouch 10y ago
    Seems like most of the best opportunities in general are exactly like this. It's not about what you know, but who you know...
    - munin 10y ago
      Oh it's worse than that, it's what you know and who you know.
    - IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
      If you see humanity as a brain and a human like a neuron, the network produces outcomes unimaginable from looking at the individual. Which is easy if you look at an individual stone-age human, and even they are actually more advanced thanks to culture and groups (tribes) than an individual human would be (which would be more akin to a "Mowgli", grown up without learning from and support of the group). So it's no surprise who you know is important - the brain is mostly about connectivity, not about the individual neuron. Just a model for thought, obviously not a complete description ("every model is wrong"). I think the value of this model, if you can warm up to it, is that you stop worrying that "it's all about the connections" - because it really is and it's useful that way because that's a major point of how a network works. So do work on your connectivity! And also just like in the brain, a few high-quality connections are worth much more than a thousand low-quality ones.
    - chrisweekly 9y ago
      It's not who you know, it's who knows you.
  - samstave 10y ago
    Fantastic insight. Thank you.
srbl 10y ago
I work on several DARPA programs and agree with most of this. But some programs are by design far more basic or applied than others. Also worth noting - DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees. The programs (and their vision, and their success) depend quite a bit on the PM, and on their ideas and engagement. To a lesser extent success depends upon the SETAs as well.
- munin 10y ago
  > DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees. Eh. You can get like a $200/hr rate. If you're a small company with low overhead, you can get paid quite competitively with the private sector in base comp. Difficult to match big G stock grants, though, no one is becoming a millionaire off of this work. Unless of course what you do on the grant can be turned into a billion dollar company, because (generally) contractors walk away from research programs with liberal rights to the IP they create, with the government retaining some rights to use, but very rarely (IME) retaining direct ownership. Of course, it's probably not that likely that what you do can turn into a billion dollar company but hey, one can dream...
  - omarchowdhury 10y ago
    Thankfully one doesn't (usually) need to create a billion dollar company to become a millionaire.

by munin 10y ago

samstave 10y ago

Gosh, this is an interesting thread... Request: can you give an AMA on how one actually proposes/gets funding from darpa or at least an ELI5 on the topic... What sort of idea should one have where you say to yourself "gee, I should hit up darpa with this!"

munin 10y ago
Honestly there is a truth and a super-truth, to use theater terms. The truth, is that you should look at the Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) that DARPA, specifically the Information Innovation Office (I2O) makes. There will be big PDFs that have lots of boiler plate and look really boring, but these are basically documents written by a program manager (PM) that describes what their envisioned research program is, how they see it being divided up, and what kind of researchers they see doing work in each area of their research program. A research program is split up into one of many (between 3 and 8) technical areas (TA) and there will be language in the BAA describing how many TAs one performer might propose to. Overall a TA can be described at a high level as one of a few roles: a blue team, a red team, and a white team. There will usually be more than one blue team, at most one red team, and precisely one white team. A blue team does the R&D on the program. Each blue team can have their own unique approach to addressing the research challenges laid out by the PM. Usually the blue teams have competing or complimentary approaches, it is seen as a waste of money to pay two blue teams to do exactly the same thing. A red team evaluates the work done by the blue team. Exactly what this means depends on what the blue team builds. The white team "holds the room together" by fitting the PMs vision together with what the blue team does. The white team usually has a much closer relationship with the PM and usually the white team is pre-determined by the time the BAA is made public. Blue teams are usually teams of 2-4 companies / universities. These teams usually form before a BAA comes out due to people "in the know" getting a rumor about an upcoming program, or just after it comes out, based on prior relationships. It's kind of rare to have a blue team that is only one entity, but depending on the entity and the size of the program, it can happen. The path to a successful proposal is demonstrating that your team has ideas that are relevant to the PM and that you can successfully execute them. You show this by having a stack of prior work, good ideas, and a well formed and coherent proposal. Think of the proposal as an audition - if you as a team can't get it together for a month and write a 30 page document describing what you want to do, you probably can't keep it together for 4 years working on something. Your team reads the BAA, does some analysis, figures out how your ideas and past work can apply to the research program proposed by the BAA, and then you write the story up. If you do a good job, and your story is more compelling than other people, you get the money. The super-truth is that it's an old boys club with a lot of luck and nepotism. The way people get "in" is when their peers go to DARPA to be a PM. Then you, the researcher, can think "Well Dr. Smith knows about X and likes X+Y, I do some Y, I have an idea that could use some funding, what would Dr. Smith like to read about." Then you write it up and e-mail it to them. Luck is a big factor here because PMs get e-mails like this all the time. It's almost essential to already be in the PMs rolodex/friend group to get some of their cycles. They like to say that they want to have people outside their circle approach them with new ideas but that's kind of a white lie, there are lots of people in the world and a finite amount of the PMs time.
- itchyouch 10y ago
  Seems like most of the best opportunities in general are exactly like this. It's not about what you know, but who you know...
  - munin 10y ago
    Oh it's worse than that, it's what you know and who you know.
  - IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
    If you see humanity as a brain and a human like a neuron, the network produces outcomes unimaginable from looking at the individual. Which is easy if you look at an individual stone-age human, and even they are actually more advanced thanks to culture and groups (tribes) than an individual human would be (which would be more akin to a "Mowgli", grown up without learning from and support of the group). So it's no surprise who you know is important - the brain is mostly about connectivity, not about the individual neuron. Just a model for thought, obviously not a complete description ("every model is wrong"). I think the value of this model, if you can warm up to it, is that you stop worrying that "it's all about the connections" - because it really is and it's useful that way because that's a major point of how a network works. So do work on your connectivity! And also just like in the brain, a few high-quality connections are worth much more than a thousand low-quality ones.
  - chrisweekly 9y ago
    It's not who you know, it's who knows you.
- samstave 10y ago
  Fantastic insight. Thank you.

srbl 10y ago

I work on several DARPA programs and agree with most of this. But some programs are by design far more basic or applied than others. Also worth noting - DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees. The programs (and their vision, and their success) depend quite a bit on the PM, and on their ideas and engagement. To a lesser extent success depends upon the SETAs as well.

munin 10y ago
> DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees. Eh. You can get like a $200/hr rate. If you're a small company with low overhead, you can get paid quite competitively with the private sector in base comp. Difficult to match big G stock grants, though, no one is becoming a millionaire off of this work. Unless of course what you do on the grant can be turned into a billion dollar company, because (generally) contractors walk away from research programs with liberal rights to the IP they create, with the government retaining some rights to use, but very rarely (IME) retaining direct ownership. Of course, it's probably not that likely that what you do can turn into a billion dollar company but hey, one can dream...
- omarchowdhury 10y ago
  Thankfully one doesn't (usually) need to create a billion dollar company to become a millionaire.