IARPA ETA Proposers’ Day

Date: January 7^th 2026

Overview

The Intelligence Community (IC) needs to accelerate the delivery of essential technologies to meet the nation’s most pressing national security challenges. The Emerging Technology Accelerator effort seeks to create new IC technology advantage by bridging the technical gap between emerging solutions and successful application in the IC through lean, agile programs scoped to deliver capabilities directly applicable to intelligence needs with rigorous assessment of relevant performance. IARPA has five new topic areas for industry engagement and is hosting this proposers’ day to communicate expectations for the new type of program, discuss the technical goals, and to answer questions about them.

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Intelligence Value: 

ARCADE seeks to accelerate electrical circuit design within the Intelligence Community to enable faster response to emerging national security threats at an unprecedented level of speed, reliability, and innovation.

Summary: 

ARCADE (Artificial Reasoning for Circuit Automation and Design Engineering) aims to transform and accelerate electrical circuit design by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop a comprehensive AI-knowledge assistant, extracting key information from vast technical documentation to enable engineers to perform quick, intuitive queries to meet the speed of mission.

The technical information ingested by ARCADE will include text, datasheets, diagrams, schematics, tables, and graphs. Crucial details about electrical components, their specifications and interfaces will be extracted and compiled into a comprehensive searchable knowledge platform. This capability enables engineers to perform swift, targeted queries, dramatically reducing the time it takes to find, compare, and select suitable parts. ARCADE aims to suggest and recommend optimal components based on design requirements, constraints, and performance parameters more efficiently than manually sifting through thousands of technical documents.

ARCADE is divided into three research and development task areas:

• Intelligent Data Ingestion and Interpretation
• Quickly and efficiently ingest and interpret complex technical documents, encoding specifications into a knowledge base that can be rapidly updated.
• Intelligent Query and Retrieval
• Process and transform raw data into an indexed format, enabling intelligent, context-aware queries that suggest components meeting performance parameters, utilizing interpolation of source data for precise recommendations.
• Intelligent Assistant for Component Selection
• Develop an intuitive UI that integrates into existing engineering workflows, using natural language and design parameters for optimal component selection.

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Intelligence Value:

COSMIC will allow the Intelligence Community to integrate temporally relevant geospatial information and imagery to answer key questions.

Summary:

The aim of the COSMIC program is to formulate a methodology to leverage commercial remote sensing technologies and open-source geolocation information to generate pseudo-persistent data (PPD). This will be done by combining and translating complex and novel data, such as non-nadir imagery and non-Red, Green, Blue (RGB) spectral bands, using artificial intelligence and computer vision-based methodologies into a layered, temporal geospatial model understandable by commercial agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. COSMIC will enable the development of an agentic AI analytic system trained by commercial vendors and equipped to answer intelligence questions.

COSMIC will foster routine updating and modelling of baseline geospatial information in areas through multi-source, persistent surveillance. New sensors will fluidly be incorporated into the generation of layered geospatial models as constellations and sources change over time. In addition to improving the temporal resolution of layered geospatial models, COSMIC also aims to reduce resource demands by streamlining the extraction of actionable intelligence from these models. By integrating commercial remote sensing data with existing geospatial information, the program aims to create a harmonized and up-to-date representation of the physical world that can be used by agentic processes to answer questions relevant to the IC.

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Intelligence Value

Novel and low-frequency terms (e.g., newly coined slang, jargon, coded language and undefined acronyms) present a persistent challenge for the analysis of multilingual text and speech by analysts and data scientists. Language changes quickly and can be rapidly adapted to evade detection. Decipher will compress the discovery cycle by enabling the Intelligence Community (IC) to analyze communications containing complex or cryptic language, as well as triage large, multilingual collections of text and speech for mission-relevant information that otherwise eludes modern information retrieval (search) technology.

Summary:

The Decipher program’s goal is to create capabilities to detect specialized language of interest to a user and generate probable definitions for unfamiliar, coded and novel terms. Decipher will infer potential meanings from (often limited) contextual information and provide translation and annotation of specialized terms, including jargon, slang, and acronyms, in texts and speech. The program will also develop technology to annotate text with relevant social and contextual factors, capturing nuanced meaning, as well as to detect concept drift by monitoring use of terminology as it evolves over time.

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Intelligence Value

LocUS will improve the geolocation capabilities of the Intelligence Community (IC) considerably beyond imagery-only methods and thereby increase the volume of content that can be accurately geolocated. This program will increase analysts’ ability to rapidly and accurately determine where a video clip was collected in the absence of accurate metadata indicating location. Applications for national security include human trafficking interdiction, hostage recovery, and other intelligence and law enforcement use cases.

Summary

The LocUS program aims to create technology that automatically and accurately geolocates multimedia content by maximally leveraging audio and visual information. Performers on the LocUS program will develop capabilities for indoor and outdoor terrestrial geolocation of previously unseen video clips. Solution performance will be evaluated over a variety of search areas, ranging from neighborhoods to continents.

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Intelligence Value

MOVES seeks create algorithms that aid clinicians in making diagnoses of a small set of neurological conditions using less than ideal or challenging video that may be taken from non-clinical angles and which may also include obstructed views and fully clothed subjects. This effort aims to test the feasibility of a long-term goal: to develop algorithmic tools that can assess a wide variety of health metrics of individuals and populations from open-source data.

Summary

With the increasing adoption of virtual/telemedicine, the MOVES program aims to develop algorithms that can augment virtual diagnoses of a small set of neurological movement disorders from video of subjects taken in non-clinical and uncontrolled settings. The algorithms will not be designed to replace medical professionals. They will augment the medical professional's ability to provide care in non-clinical and less than ideal settings.