DARPA to Host Proposers’ Day for Software Adaptation Program

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking potential proposers on a project that aims to capture a programmer's intent and accelerate the process to update software for Department of Defense systems.

DARPA said Tuesday it will host an event on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., to discuss the technical goals and proposal requirements for the Intent-Defined Adaptive Software initiative.

The IDAS program seeks to reduce manual software modification work by annotating engineering intentions and separating the problem description from software instantiation. The agency wants researchers to also develop tools that would generate and adapt software platforms.

“Engineers make numerous concretization decisions throughout the development process without documenting the rationale for their choices,” said Jacob Torrey, a program manager at DARPA’s Information Innovation Office.

“The context for those decisions is quickly lost, making it harder to modify or adapt the software to meet emerging requirements.”

DARPA noted it plans to conduct a series of technical exercises and that each challenge will include a set of requirements that can represent possible changes a system may experience over its lifetime such as cybersecurity threats.