The initiative until now has had no permanent home. When its nondescript, highly secure building opens this fall, it will nestle in the M-Square campus along with new offices for the University's Center for the Advanced Study of Language, the National Foreign Language Center, the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, and the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
IARPA will have easy access to the nearby National Security Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence in Suitland and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in Bethesda.
Funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the civilian secretariat that oversees all U.S. intelligence agencies, IARPA awards competitive grants for research into "high-risk, high-payoff projects," officials said.
Most of the research is highly technical, and highly classified.
"In the old days, we knew where the enemy was; the problem was we couldn't kill them fast enough," the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis C. Blair, said in a brief interview Monday. "Now it's almost getting them person by person, and technology can help us do that."
One key area of research will experiment with modeling and other techniques to reduce the amount of raw data, which officials acknowledge is overwhelming analysts.
Another will look for new techniques, perhaps including virtual worlds, that could help analysts sift more efficiently through the mountains of data pouring in from classified and open-source collections.
One current research program involves developing software that could scan eavesdropped conversations in foreign languages to understand a terrorist group's internal dynamics, determining the power of various leaders and their true intentions, according to IARPA's Web site.
Intelligence officials swamped with war, terrorism, piracy, competition from Russia and China, swine flu and other problems are looking to the researchers for relief.
"They will, I hope," said Blair, "help us find the right dots to connect."
