DARPA seeks to enhance decision-making with collaborative knowledge curation

In an attempt to unravel the complex interactions within socioeconomic systems, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking ideas on how to partially automate the process of knowledge curation. This call for innovative concepts comes as part of DARPA's Collaborative Knowledge Curation (CKC) Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity.

Knowledge curation is a crucial yet often overlooked step in decision-making. It is a process that requires sourcing information from a variety of places, determining its relevance or importance, identifying causal relationships, finding related data sets, and developing metrics to measure objectives. Despite its importance, this process is typically performed manually, which can lead to key insights being overlooked, particularly in complex systems like socioeconomic structures.

DARPA's CKC initiative aims to explore how machine assistance can improve the efficiency and depth of knowledge curation in these complex systems. "Knowledge curation is often treated as an informal precursor to model-building and decision-making," explained DARPA Innovation Fellow Dr. Allegra Beal Cohen. "The goal of CKC is to formalize this process with the help of machines, so that we can understand complicated systems faster and better."

As part of its efforts, DARPA is organizing a live virtual webinar from 10:30 a.m.- 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, July 27, 2023, to provide further information on the CKC ARC opportunity. A virtual check-in will start at 10 a.m. and registration is mandatory for all attendees. The deadline for registration is 12 p.m. on Wednesday, July 26. For more details on the webinar and to register, participants are directed to the CKC Webinar special notice and the registration page.

The CKC call is one of the topics under the ARC initiative, a program designed to accelerate the pace of innovation through the rapid exploration and analysis of numerous promising ideas. To gain more information about the ARC initiative, to view the open CKC call, or to see newly available topics, interested individuals can visit the ARC page.

The ARC opportunities are managed by DARPA's Innovation Fellows. For more information about the DARPA Innovation Fellowship and how to apply, visit here. By encouraging and fostering creative ideas in knowledge curation, DARPA hopes to revolutionize the way decision-making is conducted in complex socioeconomic systems.