The mad scientists at the Pentagon love a challenge, and this week they've got two. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced new projects this week intended to find new answers about what goes wrong during brain disease and to build computer systems that could patch their own networks for incredible real-time IT security.
The smaller of the endeavors, money-wise, is the Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC)—a name meant to echo the vehicle grand challenges the agency has staged in the past. DARPA calls this new one "the first-ever tournament for fully automatic network systems." CGC would call on research teams to design a system that can go into network (one DARPA specifically built to interact with automated systems), evaluate the software, find vulnerabilities in it, generate patches, and apply those fixes to the network, all without human intervention. The top team could win $2 million, with $1 million for second place and $750,000 for third. The finals are slated for 2016.
Meanwhile, the agency also officially announced Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS), a $70 million DARPA initiative to better understand the root causes of brain diseases. DARPA says it plans "to pursue advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology that could lead to new clinical understanding of how neuropsychological illnesses manifest in the brain and to advanced therapies to reduce the burden and severity of illness in afflicted troops and veterans."
DARPA's neuroscience project is part of President Obama's initiative to better understand the brain, announced earlier this year. This effort starts with the basic science: drawing up a better understanding of how serious brain illnesses affect the brain across its many regions. It's one of the big questions about the brain neuroscientists have been investigating for years; hopefully the money and muscle of DARPA can help to push research at a faster pace.