6 ms·
DARPA solicitation for the Active Social Engineering Defense program (2017)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway-blaze 2y agoTo be fair, Thomson Reuters is a huge company, with the Reuters news division being only one of the groups within. This may not be anything but a clickbaity title on a grant. This kerfuffle could be quickly solved if Thomson Reuters published their grant proposal as submitted to and selected by DARPA for this program.
- stefantalpalaru 2y ago[dead]
- ipunchghosts 2y agoDARPA has a rich history of doing fundamental research but today its largely composed of engineering tasks which for whatever reason arent built by the warfare centers. The days of doing fundamental research are mostly gone in the organization. Name something in the AI/ML space that came out of DARPA in the last 15 years. CNNs- no, deep learning - no, attention - no, LLMs - no, test time training - no. Its a good engineering org these days building cool things but there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds. The research focused has significantly waned over the last 20 years which is a shame as there are LOTS of fundamental AI/ML problems which no one is studying in industry.
- whiplash451 2y agoAI/ML is a solution, not a problem. DARPA’s mission is to define the problem space, not the solution space.
- ipunchghosts 2y agoYES! I should add that they should be thinking about intelligence generally, not AI/ML.
- jacobr1 2y agoA good example of this was the grand challenge with autonomous vehicles. It spurred all sorts of AI and Robotics related innovation that spun into different directions.
- whiplash451 2y agoThis almost made it to my previous reply, but the DARPA Challenge was 18 years ago. There might be other ground-breaking challenges that DARPA did since then, I'm just not aware of them.
- ipunchghosts 2y agoI believe the contribution here is overstated. None of the tech used for today's AVs relies on anything developed for grand challenge, including any principles they derived. The leading tech today was derived purely from industry outside the dod space and cifar.
- whiplash451 2y agoThat's not the point. The point is to put it front and center for the tech companies and the general community (think of it as a call for proposal). Would Google have invested into self-driving if DGC had not happened? Very unclear. Note that the initial Waymo team was a direct draft of the winning Stanford team at the DARPA Urban Challenge'07.
- ipunchghosts 2y agoI think googles could care less about what darpa is doing. How would I know? I'm a darpa PM and google isn't reaching out to me or my team. I think what you are seeing is correlation but not causation. Stanford was working on self driving long before darpa, same with cmu. The darpa money was just a bonus but I don't think it pushed anything ahead. After the first few years of the darpa challenge, many teams were able to finish. Yet here we are in 2025 and I cam get bounding box detections on video to not jitter or drop between frames because of some unlucky pixel combination. Humans have zero issues and aren't even able to perceive these minute differences. My guess is vision will be solve in about 18 months using methods developed purely in industry.
- _yb2s 2y ago> there's nothing special about having darpa build it other than they provide funds DARPA chooses real world engineering/technical problems, and then works closely with the external grantees that develop possible solutions, to solve the problem together - rapidly. Fundamental discoveries often come out of that kind of focused well resourced problem solving, but it's not really the goal.
- ipunchghosts 2y agoThat's what ousd is for.
- mometsi 2y agoEdit: Whoops. I incorrectly believed that Caffe was developed with DARPA support. I see DARPA acknowledgments on papers written at BLVC by some of the same authors, but not on Caffe itself.
- jeffbee 2y agoGuy walks into federal office, claims to be in charge, starts plugging in his PC, demands authorization. "Social engineering" or nah?
- kevcampb 2y agoFor context, this is likely related to an Elon Musk tweet earlier today https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887185381797343504 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887185381797343504 quoting Ian Miles Cheong > Can someone explain to me why the Department of Defense provided $9,147,532.00 to Reuters for "ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD)"
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI guess he has to ask twitter because he doesn't actually have clearance to ask someone who would know
- yieldcrv 2y agoNarrator: he has clearance Elon is aiming to inflame and rage bait by providing insight into what the government authorizes payments for, without context Its working
- iugtmkbdfil834 2y agoIn a very real sense, do you think its appropriate for one's government actively attempt to social engineer the population it is supposed to serve?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoThe grant is for "proposals in the area of automated defense against social engineering attacks."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iugtmkbdfil834 2y agoWould you be willing to expand on that definition? Are you referring to this part[1]? https://www.highergov.com/document/hr001117s0050-amendment-02-pdf-a3f775/ https://www.highergov.com/document/hr001117s0050-amendment-0...
- metalman 2y agoIt is only possible to "socialy engineer" people who are genualy unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living, and who are looking for a prompt that will improve there lot. The "solicitation" is absolute proof that the government has failed to provide and support the most basic requirements for a stable society, and is floundering around trying to spin the whole mess, and blame someone else. And 10 mill to one of the major media distributors is on top, of what is realy billions worth of free media coverage for anything the government want to promote. Which means they are panicking.Not that that isnt totaly obvious. They should panic, a lot, because after bieng lied to and cheated for generations now, many ordinary people have come to the reasonable and rational conclusion, that in the face of informational chaos, they can just go ahead and believe ANYTHING, that makes them feel a bit better....for now....and then believe something else later, maybe, or just make stuff up, that they believe, and there friends like, and 27 min latter, its been seen by 37 million others. And they like it, and speak directly to this, and are doing it consiously ,and dont give a rats ass about most of what is happening, and at any moment go bat shit crazy for some new revolutionary type of chewy candy, and since china is the only one who can tool up to make 4 billion dollors of candy overnight, they will get the order, and china will mint another billionair....happens every few days there is no defence
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- itishappy 2y ago> It is only possible to "socially engineer" people who are genuinely unsatisfied with what they have and how they are living... Brother that's all of us! If anyone here wakes up each morning and goes "yup, this is my lot in life and I wouldn't change a thing" then please share your secret!
- GGByron 2y agoDoesn't that seem a bit too complacent? Personally I've always thought the opposite - malcontents have more to gain and less to lose by criticizing or opposing the status quo.
- 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- EfficientDude 2y ago[dead]
- yowayb 2y agoI'm in Vietnam and have a bunch of extended family around. The key is social bonds. Outside of the kids' school/sports/arts they're allowed total freedom. And the variety of play (both on and offline) is astonishing. But the thing that stands out is that a good half of them are curled on a couch or hiding in a corner on their phones...and the parents don't care...because as soon as a parent asks for something to be done, the kid drops everything and jumps to do it. By having real people around (that love them) they know that everything in the phone is less real.
- suraci 2y agofirst, i need to post the classic joke again... > A Russian is on an airliner heading to the US, and the American in the seat next to him asks, “So what brings you to the US?” The Russian replies, “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American says, “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.” then, based on all the defenses and copes for this contract (and USAID) that I have seen here, I take back the conclusion that I naively drew earlier: > Americans are heavily misled by propaganda. No, Americans are not misled by propaganda, Americans are participating in the propaganda such a great work, so much to learn
- user32489318 2y ago> such a great work, so much to learn Is this doge meme in a political setting?
- rtkwe 2y agoNo, at least unlikely imo, this is written as a stereotype of how Russians (and people who's first language was related to Russian) often speak in English at first because of the grammar differences between the two languages.
- suraci 2y agothat's interesting since i said that with my grammatical habits of chinese, or, Chinglish but I didn't know why it looks like Russify English, can you explain more?
- rtkwe 2y agoIt might just be priming. It was setup as a Russian character so I was reading it with that in mind (and a THICC accent).