IARPA to Host Proposers’ Day Conference for BETTER Program on March 29

March 19, 2018 — The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers’ Day Conference for the BETTER program on March 29, 2018 in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation. The conference will be held from 8:00am to 4:00pm EDT in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The purpose of the conference will be to provide information on BETTER and the research problems the program aims to address, to address questions from potential proposers, and to provide a forum for potential proposers to present their capabilities for teaming opportunities.

This announcement serves as a pre-solicitation notice and is issued solely for information and planning purposes. The Proposers’ Day Conference does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals or proposal abstracts. Conference attendance is voluntary and is not required to propose to future solicitations (if any) associated with this program. IARPA will not provide reimbursement for any costs incurred to participate in this Proposers’ Day.

Program Description and Goals

The amount of unstructured text information generated daily is exponentially increasing. This presents challenges for analysts of various types to classify, triage, and examine all relevant information for their specific problem area of interest, with potential applications to multiple languages. To keep pace with this ever-increasing amount of information, new tools and methods are needed to enable personalized extraction of semantic information from text and the application of such semantic information to triage and retrieval problems.

Current systems and methods often treat extraction problems as “one size fits all” with ontologies defined a priori and used to address a wide range of analyst needs. Additionally, information retrieval systems lack a deep integration with information extraction systems, especially when viewed in light of personalized information extraction. A final hurdle many tools face is the applicability to a single language or problem domain.

The BETTER program aims to develop enhanced methods for personalized, multilingual semantic extraction and retrieval from text. The goal is to provide a user with a system that quickly and accurately extracts complex semantic information, targeted for a specific user, from text. The system then uses this extracted information to discover and triage relevant documents from a large corpus. Toward this end, BETTER will focus on three research areas: 1) information extraction, 2) information retrieval, and 3)human-in-the-loop interaction. BETTER will apply these three research areas across three phrases composed of diverse problem areas and language sets. Increasingly fine-grained information needs will serve to focus the information extraction and retrieval elements throughout each phase, as well as providing a basis for human-in-the-loop interaction.

Registration Information

Attendees must register no later than 5pm EST on March 22, 2018 at https://eventmanagement.cvent.com/BETTERPD. Directions to the conference facility and other materials will be available on that website. No walk-in registrations will be allowed.

Due to space limitations, attendance will be limited to the first 125 registrants and to no more than 2 representatives per organization. All attendees will be required to present a government-issued photo identification to enter the conference.

Additional Information

The morning session will include an overview of the program goals, technical challenges, and expected participation requirements. A description of how the solutions will be evaluated will be provided.

The afternoon will include a poster session to provide an opportunity for attendees to present their organizations’ capabilities and to explore teaming arrangements. Attendees who wish to present organization capabilities for teaming opportunities may submit a request through the registration web site. Details on the poster format, and the procedure for submitting a request to present, will be provided after approval to register for the conference has been granted. These presentations are not intended to solicit feedback from the Government, and Government personnel will not be present during the presentations.

This Proposers’ Day is intended for participants who are eligible to compete on the anticipated Broad Agency Announcement(BAA). Other Government Agencies, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs), or any other similar organizations that have a special relationship with the Government, that gives them access to privileged or proprietary information, or access to Government equipment or real property, will not be eligible to submit proposals to the anticipated BAA nor participate as team members under proposals submitted by eligible entities. While such entities are not prohibited from attending the Proposers’ Day, due to space limitations, preference will be given first to those organizations that are eligible to compete. IARPA will not provide reimbursement for costs incurred to participate in this conference. By registering on the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website, conference participants may choose to add their contact information to the Interested Vendors List on FBO for the purpose of teaming, or exchange information during the conference. A separate attendees list will not be provided.

Source: IARPA