HR001121S0024-Amendment-03.pdf

Broad Agency Announcement

Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU)

Information Innovation Office

HR001121S0024

Amendment 3

June 25, 2021

Summary of Amendment 3 Changes:

The purpose of Amendment 3 is to extend the Proposal Due Date and Time to July 2, 2021, 12:00 noon (ET). Please note that if you have already submitted a proposal, a resubmission will not be necessary.

The updated submission date is also highlighted in yellow throughout the document:

1. PART I: OVERVIEW INFORMATION; Dates

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART I: OVERVIEW INFORMATION

PART II: FULL TEXT OF ANNOUNCEMENT

I. Funding Opportunity Description

A. Program Overview B. Program Structure C. Program Metrics D. Deliverables E. Intellectual Property

II. Award Information A. General Award Information B. Fundamental Research

III. Eligibility Information A. Eligible Applicants B. Organizational Conflicts of Interest C. Cost Sharing/Matching

IV. Application and Submission Information A. Address to Request Application Package B. Content and Form of Application Submission

V. Application Review Information A. Evaluation Criteria B. Review of Proposals

VI. Award Administration Information A. Selection Notices and Notifications B. Administrative and National Policy Requirements C. Reporting D. Electronic Systems E. DARPA Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative (EEI)

VII. Agency Contacts VIII. Other Information

A. Collaborative Efforts/Teaming B. Proposers’ Day C. Associate Contractor Agreement (ACA)

IX. APPENDIX 1 – PROPOSAL SUMMARY SLIDE

PART I: OVERVIEW INFORMATION

Federal Agency Name – Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Information Innovation Office (I2O) Funding Opportunity Title – Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) Announcement Type – Initial Announcement Funding Opportunity Number – HR001121S0024 Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance Numbers (CFDA) – 12.910 Research and

Technology Development Dates o Posting Date: April 29, 2021 o Proposers’ Day: April 30, 2021 o Proposal Due Date and Time: July 2, 2021, 12:00 noon (ET)

Anticipated individual awards – DARPA anticipates multiple awards for Technical Area (TA)1 and TA2, and a single award for TA3

Types of instruments that may be awarded -- Procurement Contracts, Cooperative Agreements, Other Transactions (OT), or Technology Investment Agreements (TIA)

Agency contact o Point of Contact

The BAA Coordinator for this effort can be reached at:

Email: CCU@darpa.mil

DARPA/I2O

ATTN: HR001121S0024

675 North Randolph Street Arlington, VA 22203-2114 mailto:CCU@darpa.mil

PART II: FULL TEXT OF ANNOUNCEMENT

I. Funding Opportunity Description

This publication constitutes a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) as contemplated in Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 6.102(d)(2) and 35.016 and 2 CFR § 200.203. Any resultant award negotiations will follow all pertinent law and regulation, and any negotiations and/or awards for procurement contracts will use procedures under FAR 15.4, Contract Pricing, as specified in the BAA.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals in the following area of interest: building natural language processing technologies that recognize, adapt to, and recommend how to operate within the emotional, social, and cultural norms that differ across societies, languages, and group affinities. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.

Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

A. Program Overview

The U.S. Government and its agencies, including the Department of Defense (DoD), operate globally and are in constant contact with diverse cultures. Communicative understanding, not simply of local languages, but also of social customs and cultural backgrounds, lies at the heart of Civil Affairs and Military Information Support Operations activities, which together comprise the vast majority of U.S. counterinsurgency and stabilization efforts. Similarly, cultural understanding is critical to successful Information Operations, which increasingly involve so-called “cognitive-emotional conflict,” where feelings are targeted, as well as ideas. Cross-cultural miscommunication not only derails negotiations, but also can be a contributing factor leading to war. The likelihood of communicative failure increases dramatically where significant social, cultural, or ideological differences exist.

The Computational Cultural Understanding (CCU) program will create cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a DoD operator’s situational awareness and interactional effectiveness. CCU will build natural language processing technologies that recognize, adapt to, and recommend how to operate within the emotional, social, and cultural norms that differ across societies, languages, and group affinities. To support diverse and emergent use cases, CCU technologies will be engineered to require minimal-to-no training data in a local culture, while maximizing operator success during negotiations and other interactions in the field. Instead of relying primarily on annotated training data, systems will leverage qualitative and quantitative findings from fields such as psychology, sociology, or other relevant disciplines, as well as minimally-supervised machine learning techniques, in order to infer the meaning of unlabeled discourse behaviors in context. Automated systems would be a welcome force-multiplier for DoD interpreters; however, unlike the human cultural interpreters who enable U.S. forces today, such systems are currently incapable of accurately analyzing cross-cultural communication or providing useful assistance to negotiations beyond basic machine translation.1 To achieve relative parity with human interpreters, who provide cultural insight and leverage this knowledge in the translation process, CCU research will provide foundational technical innovations to assist negotiators and analysts with language analysis and cross-cultural dialogue in the field. These advances in the area of cross-cultural understanding will also inform processes for training and planning.

Despite remarkable recent advances in machine learning and multimedia analysis, today’s human language technology applications are inadequate for cross-cultural communicative analysis. To remedy these deficiencies and advance communication technology towards enablement of greater cultural understanding, the CCU program will address the following research topics:

Automatic discovery of sociocultural norms. In order to determine the social, cultural, and contextual factors that impact effective communication and rapport building, human language technologies must be capable of automatic discovery of sociocultural norms that influence discourse. This requirement will be especially challenging to meet, due to the fact that unsupervised techniques will require development of new features to address this research problem, while comprehensive and varied annotated data sets remain unavailable.

Generalization of emotion recognition across cultures. In order to interpret speaker emotions as influenced by sociocultural context, human language technologies must be able to generalize their recognition of emotion across different languages and cultures.

However, current systems degrade significantly in cross-cultural test conditions that may mirror DoD emergent use cases, where neither labeled nor unlabeled training data are available. Two major limitations of current approaches are the high cost of training data creation for each new language and a low ability to address low-resource languages at all.

Detecting impactful changes in communicative practice at multiple timescales. In order to identify shifts in norms and emotions that are indicative of communicative failure or impending conflict, human language technologies must be able to detect important changes in communication. While promising change detection methods exist, current frameworks lack an understanding of which features are most crucial to detecting imminent communicative failure.

Providing dialogue assistance to cross-cultural interaction. The ability to analyze conversations for evidence of cross-cultural misunderstanding and suggest remediation measures is crucial for effective communication. No existing technologies, however, are able to provide real-time dialogue assistance in cross-cultural settings. In order to promote truly effective cross-cultural interaction, human language technologies must have the ability to detect misunderstandings and generate alternative socioculturally-appropriate utterances.

1 Meermeier et. al. (2018) describe a speech-to-speech translation application developed by the Army, the Machine Foreign Language Translation System (MFLTS).

B. Program Structure

The CCU program will create cross-cultural language understanding technologies to improve a DoD operator’s situational awareness and interactional effectiveness. Development of this overall capability will require the creation of new component technologies for the discovery of sociocultural norms, cross-cultural emotion recognition, and communicative change detection.

The CCU program will involve incorporating these technologies into a prototype platform for cross-cultural dialogue assistance, which will create the foundation for a fieldable capability. The program is structured as a 36 month effort with an 18 month Phase 1 (Base) and an 18 month Phase 2 (Option 1). CCU will involve three technical areas (TAs): TA1 – Sociocultural Analysis;

TA2 – Cross-Cultural Dialogue Assistance; and TA3 – Data Creation for Development and Evaluation. Figure 1 depicts the structure of CCU.

A proposal may address a single TA or a combination of TA1 and TA2. Any other combination of technical areas addressed in a single proposal submission is not permitted. A proposer submitting a solution to more than one TA may submit a combined proposal for both technical areas but must ensure that the budget and statement of work are well delineated so that partial awards are possible. While proposers may submit proposals for all three TAs, proposers selected for TA3 cannot be selected for any portion of the other two TAs, whether as a prime, subcontractor, or in any other capacity from an organizational to individual level. This is to avoid organizational conflict of interest situations between the TAs and to ensure objective test and evaluation results. Additionally, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) or University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) will be an evaluator for TA1 and TA2 systems as well as the TA3 data. As such, subcontractors performing under the FFRDC/UARC cannot be selected for any portion of TA1, TA2, or TA3, in any capacity from an organizational to individual level. The decision as to which proposal to consider for award is at the discretion of the Government. DARPA anticipates multiple awards for TA1 and TA2, and a single award for TA3.

Figure 1 The structure of CCU showing the different Technical Areas

Figure 2 depicts the schedule for the CCU program. Evaluations will be performed on datasets developed by the TA3 performer in consultation with the Government evaluation team;

cultures/languages will be announced and data released incrementally. There will be a total of three evaluations at months 15, 24, and 34 of the program. There will also be three mini-evaluation exercises, as shown in Figure 2. These exercises will help validate the evaluation methodology, as well as exercise the evaluation mechanisms. The TA3 performer will produce the gold-standard for the corpora used to evaluate TA1. Metrics for each TA are discussed below. Progression to Phase 2 will depend on Phase 1 program performance and the availability of funds.

Figure 2 CCU Program Schedule

To facilitate testing and evaluation, TA2 end-to-end workflows will be required to run within an emulator for a suitable mobile environment; the specific mobile environment will be decided at the outset of the program. While the TA2 frameworks will be responsible for integrating the TA1 components into the end-to-end workflow, both TA1 and TA2 proposals should describe how their proposed designs will facilitate integration into the program’s testing and evaluation environment. To facilitate development and demonstration, TA1 performers will display system outputs on corpora within visualization framework(s) to be determined by the program. The framework(s) will be required to interface with CCU-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Integrated TA1-TA2 prototypes will be assessed relative to gold-standard performance of human interpreters in operationally-relevant negotiation scenarios drawn from military training resources and/or after-action reporting. The goal is for the prototypes to achieve success rates comparable to those of human interpreters by the end of the program. To this end, evaluation in CCU will consist of two parts: (1) assessment of live, face-to-face negotiation scenarios utilizing TA2 end-to-end workflows with integrated TA1 component(s); and (2) corpus-based evaluation of TA1 system outputs from multimedia input. All evaluation metrics are expressed relative to human performance and/or judgment.

Classified information will not be used in the research and development activities conducted by TA1, TA2, and TA3 performers. It is possible that transition activities carried out by the TA2 performer will require evaluation on classified data provided by transition partners, conducted in appropriate facilities.

Technical Area 1 – Sociocultural Analysis

TA1 researchers will concentrate on research and development corresponding to three distinct research tasks, namely: (1) discovery of sociocultural norms; (2) emotion recognition as a function of sociocultural norms; and (3) detection of impactful changes in sociocultural norms and emotions. Proposals must address all three tasks. TA1 work is expected to involve both unimodal and multimodal inputs, consisting of text, speech, images, and video. The results of efforts in this research area will be compiled to facilitate TA2 integration. See the description of TA3 for the data available for TA1 research. TA1 research tasks are described below.

Task 1 – Sociocultural Norm Discovery

Research and development in Task 1 will be focused on automatic discovery of the kind of sociocultural norms that humans ordinarily acquire tacit knowledge of through a lifetime of learning and interaction. To emulate this learning capability, researchers will create new technologies able to discover and characterize sociocultural norms observed in unlabeled discourse. It is anticipated that technical approaches will draw from established computational techniques for unsupervised modeling, such as graph and embedding techniques for clustering, neural network attention models for norm description and characterization, and/or from mixed statistical and symbolic approaches (sometimes described as neurosymbolic or 'wave 3' approaches), as well as be informed by findings from psychology, sociology, or other relevant disciplines. In addition, algorithms must be able to leverage negative emotions detected by analytics developed for Task 2 in order to identify potential instances of norm violation.

Task 2 – Cross-Cultural Emotion Recognition

Human interpreters continuously monitor emotional feedback from conversational participants (e.g., from facial expression, tone of voice, and language), but currently-existing multimodal human language technologies designed to fulfill a similar role are of limited utility in many real-life use cases, due to their high data requirements and inability to generalize across different languages and cultures. Emotion recognition is also important to multimedia analysis in the context of planning and training. Researchers will aim to generalize emotion recognition across cultures by improving the performance of continuous, segment-level multimodal cross-cultural emotion recognition technologies, with the aim of overcoming the significant degradation of performance exhibited by current systems in cross-cultural settings. Adversarial learning techniques show promise in closing this performance gap, but have only achieved relative parity through pooled multicultural models with the aid of labeled training data in all languages. Researchers must create technologies capable of meeting or exceeding the performance of state-of-the-art, mono-cultural emotion recognition engines, while simultaneously minimizing or eliminating the need for labeled training data in the test culture, resulting in a capability for culture-general, universal emotion recognition.

Task 2 frameworks should be capable of providing continuous emotion recognition outputs expressed as both (1) Valence-Arousal measurements and (2) category labels, within a taxonomy to be defined during the program. Task 2 algorithms may leverage norms discovered in Task 1 (pertaining to e.g. setting, participants) to improve emotion recognition.

Task 3 – Communicative Change Detection

Humans are naturally able to perceive crucial shifts in norms and emotions in discourse, while computers are currently much less capable of detecting these changes. Task 3 research will be focused on analyzing Task 1 and Task 2 outputs concerning a face-to-face interaction or a document (see Technical Area 3 description below for the definition of a document) for the purpose of detecting changes at multiple timescales in order to identify impactful shifts

(1) in emotional expression; (2) in the evolution of norms during an interaction (e.g., changes in formality, in cultural setting, in reactions to perceived social roles); and (3) in long-term cultural trends. Task 3 algorithms must be capable of providing indications and warnings of failure points to support TA2’s communication remediation. In addition to providing inputs to TA2, Task 3 work must also produce a standalone evaluation module suitable for analysis to support planning and training; this evaluation module should provide access to all Task 1, Task 2, and Task 3 outputs.

Technical Area 2 – Cross-Cultural Dialogue Assistance

Human cultural interpreters are able to assess the progress of an interaction, identify misunderstanding and conflict, and offer appropriate remediation in real-time; however, current computational models lack these crucial capabilities. In CCU, TA2 researchers will leverage TA1 analytic outputs as components of a dialogue assistance service able to follow ongoing conversations, detect misunderstandings and discord in real-time, and suggest culturally and socially-appropriate conversational actions for remediation. For example, negotiation efforts would benefit greatly from automated assistance in promoting mutual understanding in the face of initial or even persistent disagreement or opposition among communicants. TA2 research must confront multiple challenges that remain unaddressed by current dialogue systems, including automated detection of sociocultural context (e.g., communicants’ social roles, relative ages, genders, etc. as well as specifics of the social setting), automated identification of the need for operator assistance, and dialogue generation, all while incorporating program-external machine translation components. TA2 algorithms must be capable of detecting sociocultural settings from language and image inputs, of revising operator utterances to increase interactional effectiveness, and of incorporating culture-independent techniques that enable generalization to approximately six cultures/languages by program completion. Program language + culture pairs will be announced incrementally, as described in Figure 2; the first language + culture pair will be Chinese (Mandarin). TA2 performers will integrate and deliver their algorithms into a portable, stand-alone unit for evaluation and demonstration purposes, with a laptop form-factor required at the end of Phase 1 and a smartphone form-factor required at the end of Phase 2.

Phase 2 will include evaluation runs where TA2 units must operate without reliance on internet connectivity. CCU will focus solely on software development and will leverage commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. TA2 performers should include input mechanisms, such as smart glasses, allowing for audio and visual observation of participants during an interaction. Input mechanisms are assumed to consist of primarily wearable components. Proposals should address the realism of the sensors proposed for a field setting. Input mechanisms should also allow for visual observation of operator behaviors (e.g., facial expressions) in addition to an operator’s speech. Output mechanisms to provide remediation to the TA2 user should include both text and text-to-speech (TTS) as configurable options. Proposers may leverage open source or other existing TTS components provided that these components may be made available to the program as a whole.

Technical Area 3 – Data Creation for Development and Evaluation

The goal of TA3 is to create data for development and evaluation in multiple cultures/languages that support research work by TA1 and TA2, as well as performance measurement for the individual components and the end-user application. Program language + culture pairs will be announced and corresponding data released to researchers incrementally, as described in Figure 2; the first language + culture pair will be Chinese (Mandarin).

TA1 will require approximately 50,000 documents per language for use in development and evaluation; of this data set, 20% will be annotated and the other 80% unlabeled. A document is defined as a portion of text (which may include associated image), audio, or video showing a conversation involving two or more participants. Each textual document should contain at least 300 words and each video or audio segment should comprise at least five minutes, although longer documents are preferred. Video (with accompanying audio) should comprise 75% of the development and evaluation data set with the remaining 25% distributed across audio and text.

TA3 proposals should describe the generality of the data included. All data must demonstrate a variety of sociocultural norms, as well as evidence of emotion. At least half of the documents must also demonstrate changes in either the sociocultural norms or the emotion of the communication participants. Data for specific languages/cultures (to be named during the program) will be released to TA1/TA2 performers according to the schedule described in Figure

2. Data for each language + culture pair should be incrementally delivered to the Government evaluation team in relatively equal installments on a monthly basis. In cases where the language + culture pair does not correspond to a surprise evaluation condition, additional development data will be provided to TA1/TA2 performers each month. Each monthly installment should provide additional data corresponding to each of the TA1 tasks as well as TA2. The completed development dataset should be provided at least 4 weeks in advance of the first evaluation where that language + culture pair is included; additionally, the completed evaluation dataset for the language + culture pair should be available to the Government evaluation team at least two weeks in advance of the first evaluation where that language + culture pair is included.

Documents should be annotated with the sociocultural norms and emotional states of the participants, including the strength of the emotions expressed. The format of document annotations may be sparse to encourage efficiency; a single, uniform annotation will be sufficient through the document regions where the label (norm, emotion) for a given annotation type is not changing, but when a change occurs, the point at which the change takes place should be marked, as should the new state(s) of the participants. The relative impact of the change on the subsequent course of the interaction should also be identified. These annotations will be used for training and development data and as the gold-standard data for evaluation.

In support of TA2 development, the task for the data provider is to supply examples of simulated interpreter-mediated interactions that require knowledge of sociocultural norms (as described in the ceiling condition in Table 1, below) such that these interactions can be modeled by TA2 performers. Using a range of scenarios defined in collaboration with the government evaluation team, the data provider will be required to assemble appropriate participants, record their interactions, and annotate the resulting video for TA1 analysis of sociocultural norms, emotions, and impactful changes in norms and emotions. Interpreter corrections will serve as gold-standard remediation for the participants’ utterances. Face-to-face interactions will be annotated for approximately 15 scenario types for the ceiling condition. Proposals should address the realism of the data proposed as well as the recording quality. Data support for TA2 evaluation will be provided by a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) or University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) to be named at a later date.

C. Program Metrics

The evaluation design and metrics for CCU are described below. These metrics may serve as the basis for determining whether satisfactory progress is being made to warrant continued funding of the program. Although the following program metrics are specified, proposers should note that the Government has identified these goals with the intention of defining the scope of effort, while affording the maximum flexibility, creativity, and innovation in proposing solutions to the stated problem.

The evaluation will be conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and an FFRDC/UARC to be named at a later date. The evaluation will incorporate TA1 corpus-based metrics and TA1/TA2 assessment in the context of real-time, interactive dialogue scenarios.

To facilitate comparison with existing state-of-the-art technologies and demonstrate advances in multimedia analysis, TA1 performance will be assessed via corpus-based evaluation. The platform will be presented with a dataset of documents in each language being used in a particular evaluation. The platform will have to decide what the appropriate sociocultural norms, emotions, and emotion strengths for each region of each document are, as well as to identify regions of each document indicating impactful changes in norms and emotions. The system output will be compared with the gold-standard data generated by the TA3 performer. The correlation between the system output and the annotated gold-standard data will be the metric for this evaluation. TA1 components will also be evaluated in the context of having been incorporated into TA2 systems. The TA2 evaluation will consist of trials of dialogue assistance motivated by scenarios developed by the government evaluation team. The evaluation will involve four separate conditions, as shown in Table 1.

In the ceiling condition, the dialogue assistance role will be filled by a human with expertise and an understanding of the sociocultural aspects of the language and culture being used for that evaluation. In the baseline condition, the dialogue assistance will be provided by speech-to-speech machine translation only. These two operational conditions will involve users with limited or no language skills, respectively. There will be approximately 10 such scenarios evaluated in each language and approximately three subjects in each participant role. The dialogue sessions will be recorded for further analysis. To assess TA2, the recording will be scored later to indicate (1) failures in detecting a need for assistance; and (2) how well the automatic dialogue assistance correlated with the human expert assistance in the ceiling condition. The recording will also be annotated for TA1 analysis to support a metric of system output correlation with the gold-standard.

To facilitate evaluation, an initial TA1-TA2 integration test will occur at Month 6, and the Month 9 mini-evaluation will provide baseline results. The Month 15 full evaluation will have a goal of achieving a 20% improvement over the baseline, while the remaining evaluations will assess system performance relative to the ceiling condition, with target metrics to be announced at the outset of the program.

Condition Participant 1 Assistant Role Participant 2

Ceiling limited language ability or no language ability

Native interpreter (actual, or represented by a subject matter expert) Operational Condition 1 limited language ability TA2 system

Operational Condition 2 no language ability

TA2 system, with machine translation input

Baseline

Culturally-uninformed operator

(actual, or represented by a subject matter expert) no language ability

Machine translation only

Native speaker (actual, or represented by a subject matter expert)

Table 1: Testing conditions for the TA2 evaluation

D. Deliverables

Performers are required to provide, at a minimum, the deliverables described in Table 2 below.

Deliverable Schedule Technical Area(s) Software source code, executables, and models compatible with CCU APIs (1) for integration by TA2 performers, (2) for display in visualization framework(s), and (3) integrated as TA1 evaluation module for corpus evaluation

Initial integration required 4 weeks prior to each evaluation. TA1

Integrated TA2 system for evaluation

Prior to evaluation period. Early integration will be encouraged and may benefit development.

TA2

Datasets for TA1 development/evaluation and TA2 development

Monthly, with (1) the completed development data provided 4 weeks in advance of the first evaluation where the language + culture pair is

TA3

included and (2) the completed evaluation data provided 2 weeks in advance of the first evaluation where the language + culture pair is included.

Technical papers derived from work funded by CCU Prior to publication.

Annotated slide presentations One week after program event (e.g., kickoff, site visit, PI meeting).

Monthly technical status reports detailing progress made, tasks accomplished, major risks, planned activities, trip summaries, changes to key personnel, any potential issues or problem areas that require the attention of DARPA, research, development, evaluation, and transition highlights from the relevant period

Within 10 calendar days of the end of each calendar month.

Monthly financial status reports Within 10 calendar days of the end of each calendar month.

Each performer must deliver a final report at the end of the overall period of performance that summarizes their project.

Prior to program completion.

All

Table 2: Deliverables

E. Intellectual Property

The program will emphasize creating and leveraging open source technology and architecture.

Intellectual property rights asserted by proposers are strongly encouraged to be aligned with open source regimes. Additionally, components for (1) input processing, (2) Machine Translation, and (3) visualization are designed to be shared resources and should be made available to the program as a whole. Finally, to promote collaboration and to facilitate evaluation, datasets constructed or utilized by any performer must be made available to all performers within the program. Potential offerors should refer to Section VII(C) regarding Associate Contractor Agreement for more information.

A key goal of the program is to establish an open, standards-based, multi-source, plug-and-play architecture that allows for interoperability and integration. This includes the ability to easily add, remove, substitute, and modify software and hardware components. This will facilitate rapid innovation by providing a base for future users or developers of program technologies and deliverables. Therefore, it is desired that all noncommercial software (including source code), software documentation, hardware designs and documentation, and technical data generated by the program be provided as deliverables to the Government, with a minimum of Government Purpose Rights (GPR), as lesser rights may adversely impact the lifecycle costs of affected items, components, or processes.

II. Award Information

A. General Award Information

Multiple awards are anticipated. The amount of resources made available under this BAA will depend on the quality of the proposals received and the availability of funds.

The Government reserves the right to select for negotiation all, some, one, or none of the proposals received in response to this solicitation and to make awards without discussions with proposers. The Government also reserves the right to conduct discussions if it is later determined to be necessary. Additionally, DARPA reserves the right to accept proposals in their entirety or to select only portions of proposals for award. Progression to Phase 2 will depend on Phase 1 program performance and the availability of funds. If warranted, portions of resulting awards may be segregated into pre-priced options. As such, the Government reserves the right to fund proposals in phases with options for continued work, as applicable.

The Government reserves the right to request any additional, necessary documentation once it makes the award instrument determination. Such additional information may include but is not limited to Representations and Certifications (see Section IV.2.d, “Representations and Certifications”). The Government reserves the right to remove proposers from award consideration should the parties fail to reach agreement on award terms, conditions, and/or cost/price within a reasonable time. In addition, the proposer may be removed from consideration for award should the party fail to provide timely requested additional information.

Proposals identified for negotiation may result in a Procurement Contract, Cooperative Agreement, Other Transaction or Technology Investment Agreement, depending upon the nature of the work proposed, the required degree of interaction between parties, whether or not the research is classified as Fundamental Research, in addition to other factors.

Proposers looking for innovative, commercial-like contractual arrangements are encouraged to consider requesting Other Transactions. To understand the flexibility and options associated with Other Transactions, consult http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/contract-management#OtherTransactions.

In accordance with 10 U.S.C. § 2371b(f), the Government may award a follow-on production contract or Other Transaction (OT) for any OT awarded under this solicitation if: (1) that participant in the OT, or a recognized successor in interest to the OT, successfully completed the entire prototype project provided for in the OT, as modified; and (2) the OT provides for the award of a follow-on production contract or OT to the participant, or a recognized successor in interest to the OT.

In all cases, the Government contracting officer shall have sole discretion to select award instrument type, regardless of instrument type proposed, and to negotiate all instrument terms and conditions with selectees. DARPA will apply publication or other restrictions, as necessary, if it determines that the research resulting from the proposed effort will present a high likelihood of disclosing performance characteristics of military systems or manufacturing technologies that are unique and critical to defense. Any award resulting from such a determination will include a requirement for DARPA permission before publishing any information or results on the program. For more information on publication restrictions, see the section below on Fundamental Research.

http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/contract-management#OtherTransactions

B. Fundamental Research

It is DoD policy that the publication of products of fundamental research will remain unrestricted to the maximum extent possible. National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 189 defines fundamental research as follows:

‘Fundamental research’ means basic and applied research in science and engineering, the results of which ordinarily are published and shared broadly within the scientific community, as distinguished from proprietary research and from industrial development, design, production, and product utilization, the results of which ordinarily are restricted for proprietary or national security reasons.

As of the date of publication of this solicitation, the Government expects that program goals as described herein may be met by proposed efforts for fundamental research and non-fundamental research. Some proposed research may present a high likelihood of disclosing performance characteristics of military systems or manufacturing technologies that are unique and critical to defense. Based on the anticipated type of proposer (e.g., university or industry) and the nature of the solicited work, the Government expects that some awards will include restrictions on the resultant research that will require the awardee to seek DARPA permission before publishing any information or results relative to the program.

Proposers should indicate in their proposal whether they believe the scope of the research included in their proposal is fundamental or not. While proposers should clearly explain the intended results of their research, the Government shall have sole discretion to determine whether the proposed research shall be considered fundamental and to select the award instrument type. Appropriate language will be included in resultant awards for non-fundamental research to prescribe publication requirements and other restrictions, as appropriate. This language can be found at http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/additional-baa.

For certain research projects, it may be possible that although the research to be performed by a potential awardee is non-fundamental research, its proposed subawardee’s effort may be fundamental research. It is also possible that the research performed by a potential awardee is fundamental research while its proposed subawardee’s effort may be non-fundamental research.

In all cases, it is the potential awardee’s responsibility to explain in its proposal which proposed efforts are fundamental research and why the proposed efforts should be considered fundamental research.

III. Eligibility Information

A. Eligible Applicants

All responsible sources capable of satisfying the Government's needs may submit a proposal that shall be considered by DARPA.

http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/additional-baa

1. Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) and Government Entities

a) FFRDCs FFRDCs are subject to applicable direct competition limitations and cannot propose to this solicitation in any capacity unless they meet the following conditions. (1) FFRDCs must clearly demonstrate that the proposed work is not otherwise available from the private sector. (2) FFRDCs must provide a letter, on official letterhead from their sponsoring organization, that (a) cites the specific authority establishing their eligibility to propose to Government solicitations and compete with industry, and (b) certifies the FFRDC’s compliance with the associated FFRDC sponsor agreement’s terms and conditions. These conditions are a requirement for FFRDCs proposing to be awardees or subawardees.

b) Government Entities Government Entities (e.g., Government/National laboratories, military educational institutions, etc.) are subject to applicable direct competition limitations. Government Entities must clearly demonstrate that the work is not otherwise available from the private sector and provide written documentation citing the specific statutory authority and contractual authority, if relevant, establishing their ability to propose to Government solicitations and compete with industry. This information is required for Government Entities proposing to be awardees or subawardees.

c) Authority and Eligibility At the present time, DARPA does not consider 15 U.S.C. § 3710a to be sufficient legal authority to show eligibility. While 10 U.S.C.§ 2539b may be the appropriate statutory starting point for some entities, specific supporting regulatory guidance, together with evidence of agency approval, will still be required to fully establish eligibility. DARPA will consider FFRDC and Government Entity eligibility submissions on a case-by-case basis; however, the burden to prove eligibility for all team members rests solely with the proposer.

2. Other Applicants Non-U.S. organizations and/or individuals may participate to the extent that such participants comply with any necessary nondisclosure agreements, security regulations, export control laws, and other governing statutes applicable under the circumstances.

B. Organizational Conflicts of Interest

FAR 9.5 Requirements

In accordance with FAR 9.5, proposers are required to identify and disclose all facts relevant to potential OCIs involving the proposer’s organization and any proposed team member (subawardee, consultant). Under this Section, the proposer is responsible for providing this disclosure with each proposal submitted to the solicitation. The disclosure must include the proposer’s, and as applicable, proposed team member’s OCI mitigation plan. The OCI mitigation plan must include a description of the actions the proposer has taken, or intends to take, to prevent the existence of conflicting roles that might bias the proposer’s judgment and to prevent the proposer from having unfair competitive advantage. The OCI mitigation plan will specifically discuss the disclosed OCI in the context of each of the OCI limitations outlined in FAR 9.505-1 through FAR 9.505-4.

Agency Supplemental OCI Policy

In addition, DARPA has a supplemental OCI policy that prohibits contractors/performers from concurrently providing Scientific Engineering Technical Assistance (SETA), Advisory and Assistance Services (A&AS) or similar support services and being a technical performer.

Therefore, as part of the FAR 9.5 disclosure requirement above, a proposer must affirm whether the proposer or any proposed team member (subawardee, consultant) is providing SETA, A&AS, or similar support to any DARPA office(s) under: (a) a current award or subaward; or (b) a past award or subaward that ended within one calendar year prior to the proposal’s submission date.

If SETA, A&AS, or similar support is being or was provided to any DARPA office(s), the proposal must include:

The name of the DARPA office receiving the support;

The prime contract number;

Identification of proposed team member (subawardee, consultant) providing the support; and

An OCI mitigation plan in accordance with FAR 9.5.

Government Procedures

In accordance with FAR 9.503, 9.504 and 9.506, the Government will evaluate OCI mitigation plans to avoid, neutralize or mitigate potential OCI issues before award and to determine whether it is in the Government’s interest to grant a waiver. The Government will only evaluate OCI mitigation plans for proposals that are determined selectable under the solicitation evaluation criteria and funding availability.

The Government may require proposers to provide additional information to assist the Government in evaluating the proposer’s OCI mitigation plan.

If the Government determines that a proposer failed to fully disclose an OCI; or failed to provide the affirmation of DARPA support as described above; or failed to reasonably provide additional information requested by the Government to assist in evaluating the proposer’s OCI mitigation plan, the Government may reject the proposal and withdraw it from consideration for award.

C. Cost Sharing/Matching

Cost sharing is not required; however, it will be carefully considered where there is an applicable statutory condition relating to the selected award instrument. Cost sharing is encouraged where there is a reasonable probability of a potential commercial application related to the proposed research and development effort.

For more information on potential cost sharing requirements for Other Transactions for Prototype, see http://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/contract-management#OtherTransactions.

IV. Application and Submission Information

A. Address to Request Application Package

This announcement, any attachments, and any references to external websites herein constitute the total solicitation. If proposers cannot access the referenced material posted in the announcement found at www.darpa.mil, contact the administrative contact listed herein.

B. Content and Form of Application Submission

All submission documentation, including proposals must be written in English with type not smaller than 12 point font. Smaller font may be used for figures, tables, and charts. Copies of all documents submitted must be clearly labeled with the DARPA BAA number (HR001121S0024), proposer organization, and proposal title/proposal short title.

1. Proposal Format

All proposals must be in the format illustrated below. Proposals should express a consolidated effort in support of all phases of CCU. Proposals shall consist of two volumes: 1) Volume I, Technical and Management Proposal (composed of 3 parts); and 2) Volume II, Cost Proposal.

Volume I, Technical and Management Proposal, is limited to 50 pages. Volume II, Cost Proposal, has no page limit. All pages shall be formatted for printing on 8-1/2 by 11 inch paper with 1-inch margins and font size not smaller than 12 point. Font sizes of 8 or 10 point may be used for figures, tables, and charts. Document files must be in .pdf, .odx, .doc, .docx, .xls, or .xlsx formats. Submissions must be written in English. All pages should be numbered.

NOTE: Submissions that do not follow the instructions herein may be found non-conforming and may not be reviewed.

A proposal may address either a single TA, or a combination of TA1 and TA2. Combined proposals for TA1/TA2 must ensure that the budget is well delineated so that partial awards are possible. Organizations may submit multiple proposals to any one TA, or they may propose to multiple TAs. While proposers may submit proposals for all three TAs, proposers selected for TA3 cannot be selected for any portion of the other two TAs, whether as a prime, subcontractor, or in any other capacity from an organizational to individual level. A subcontractor to the FFRDC/UARC evaluator cannot be selected for any portion of TA1, TA2, or TA3, or in any capacity from an organizational to individual level.

a) Volume I, Technical and Management Proposal

(1) Section I: Administrative

(a) Cover Sheet to Include:

http://www.darpa.mil/

(1) BAA number (HR001121S0024);

(2) Technical area(s);

(3) Lead Organization submitting proposal;

(4) Type of organization, selected among the following categories: “LARGE BUSINESS”, “SMALL DISADVANTAGED BUSINESS”, “OTHER SMALL BUSINESS”, “HBCU”, “MI”, “OTHER EDUCATIONAL”, OR “OTHER NONPROFIT”;

(5) Proposer’s reference number (if any);

(6) Other team members (if applicable) and type of organization for each;

(7) Proposal title;

(8) Technical point of contact to include: salutation, last name, first name, street address, city, state, zip code, telephone, fax (if available), electronic mail (if available);

(9) Administrative point of contact to include: salutation, last name, first name, street address, city, state, zip code, telephone, fax (if available), electronic mail (if available);

(10) Total funds requested from DARPA, and the amount of cost share (if any); AND

(11) Date proposal was submitted.

(b) Official transmittal letter

(2) Section II: Summary of Proposal

A. Technical rationale, technical approach, and constructive plan for accomplishment of technical goals in support of innovative claims and deliverable creation. (In the full proposal, this section should be supplemented by a more detailed plan in Section III of the Technical and Management Proposal).

B. Innovative claims for the proposed research. This section is the centerpiece of the proposal and should succinctly describe the uniqueness and benefits of the proposed approach relative to the current state-of-art alternate approaches.

C. Deliverables associated with the proposed research and the plans and capability to accomplish technology transition and commercialization. Include in this section all proprietary claims to the results, prototypes, intellectual property, or systems supporting and/or necessary for the use of the research, results, and/or prototype. If there are no proprietary claims, this should be stated. For forms to be completed regarding intellectual property, see Section IV.B.2.i of this BAA. There is no page limit for the listed forms.

D. General discussion of other research in this area indicating advantages and disadvantages of the proposed effort.

E. Clearly defined organization chart for the program team, to include (as applicable): (1) the programmatic relationship of team member; (2) the unique capabilities of team members; (3) the task of responsibilities of team members; (4) the teaming strategy among the team members; and (5) the key personnel (Principal Investigator (PI), Program Manager (PM), and others) identified by name along with the amount of effort (% of time) to be expended by each team member during each program phase. Provide explanation if percentage of time for principal investigator or program manager is less than 50%. A short resume of each of the key personnel should be included in this section that summarizes relevant experience and expected contribution to the program.

F. A summary of the proposal in MS PowerPointTM that quickly and succinctly indicates the concept overview, key innovations, expected impact, and other unique aspects of the proposal. The format for the summary slides is included as APPENDIX 1 to this BAA and does not count against the page limit.

(3) Section III: Detailed Proposal Information

A. Statement of Work (SOW) Clearly define…