QA Round 1 HIATUS IARPA-BAA-22-01 C.pdf

Human Interpretable Attribution of Text using Underlying Structure (HIATUS) Program

IARPA-BAA-22-01

Industry Questions and Government Responses

Question Round Industry Question Paragraph & Page #

Government Response Change to

BAA

(Yes/No)

Paragraph & Page # for Change

1 1

Is it possible to streamline involvement of foreign team members from Five Eyes countries with respect to export controls and security regulations? Would coordination between partners' foreign governmental sponsors and IARPA be possible, to help ensure that all such requirements are properly met?

3.A. p.29

Per Section 3: Eligibility Information, 3.A. Eligible Applicants, of the BAA, “Foreign entities and/or individuals may participate but only as a part of a U.S. based team. The prime contractor must be a U.S. organization. Foreign entities and individuals may participate as subcontractors or employees of a U.S. organization; however, all foreign participation must comply with any necessary Non- Disclosure Agreements, Security Regulations, Export Control Laws, and other governing statutes applicable under the circumstances. Offerors are expected to ensure that the efforts of foreign participants do not either directly or indirectly compromise the laws of the United States, nor its security interests. As such, both foreign and domestic Offerors should carefully consider the roles and responsibilities of foreign participants as they pursue teaming arrangements.” At this time, IARPA cannot commit to streamlining Export Controls and Security Regulations.

Resultant contract awards will include the following IARPA Export Control Clause.

IA52.204-703 -- Export Control (Jul 2013)

(a) The contractor shall comply with all U.S. export control laws and regulations, including the International traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120 through 130, and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), 15 CFR Parts 730 through 799, in the performance of this contract. In the absence of available license exemptions or exceptions, the contractor shall be responsible for obtaining the appropriate licenses or other approvals, if required, for exports of (including deemed exports) hardware, technical data, and software, or for the provision of technical assistance.

(b) The contractor shall be responsible for obtaining export licenses, if required, before utilizing foreign persons in the performance of this contract, including instances where the work is to be performed on-site at any Government

No N/A installation (whether in or outside the United States), where the foreign person will have access to export-controlled technologies, including technical data or software.

(c) The contractor shall be responsible for all regulatory record keeping requirements associated with the use of licenses and license exemptions or exceptions.

(d) The contractor shall appropriately mark all contract deliverables controlled by ITAR and/or EAR.

(e) The contractor shall ensure that the provisions of this clause apply to its subcontractors.

2 1 Can IARPA resolve OCI's prior to proposal submission? 3.A.1., p.29-

IARPA does not have the resources to review and mitigate all OCI's for potential offeror prior to proposal submission.

Within Section 3.A.1, Organizational Conflicts of Interest, of the BAA offerors are advised that, "The Government will make OCI determinations, as applicable, for proposals that are otherwise selectable under the BAA Evaluation Factors".

Please refer to section 3.A, Eligible Applicants, to determine if you are eligible to submit a proposal, and section 3.A.1, Organizational Conflicts of Interest, for instructions on how to submit an OCI Mitigation Plan.

No N/A

3 1

The BAA says that the HTS and HRS will each be a collection of dozens of haystack corpora. It sounds like there will be a numeric code at both development and test time indicating which haystack a given document comes from. Should we expect to see the same author across multiple haystacks? (That is, blogger_jane_smith writing posts in both haystack21 and haystack29.) Or are the authors contained in each haystack unique to that haystack?

1.D.1.1, p.17

Performers should expect that documents produced by the same author may appear in multiple haystacks. No N/A

4 1

The HIATUS BAA says that the output of the privacy system should be stylistically self-consistent. That is, if five documents from a single author have been anonymized, they should still look, stylistically, like they are produced by the same author. The BAA does not comment on whether it is required that documents authored by two distinct authors still look like they were authored by two distinct people (just different people). Is a TA3 system that modifies multiple documents, each from a different author, such that those modified

1.A.1, p.9;

1.F, p.21

1.F, p. 21 of the BAA states “A final key technical consideration for TA3 is that the output of the privacy system should be stylistically self-consistent. By way of example, five documents from a single author that have each been modified by a Performer’s TA3 system should not exhibit stylistic features that make them appear to have been produced by five distinct authors; rather, all five documents should ideally exhibit stylistic properties consistent with a single author.”

In cases where a TA3 system modifies multiple documents, each from a unique author, the program requires that the

No N/A documents exhibit stylistic properties consistent with a single, anonymous author in scope?

modified versions of these documents be stylistically distinct, i.e., they must not be consistent with a single author.