Contracting Office Address

Other Defense Agencies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Contracts Management Office, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203-1714

Description

Special Focus Area:

SOL BAA06-19, Addendum 6, DUE: 11/20/06
Technical POC: Dr. Amy Kruse, DARPA/DSO, Ph: 571-218-4338, Email: baa06-19@darpa.mil Website Submission: http://www.sainc.com/dso0619

DESCRIPTION

(Note: This BAA Addendum 6 is submitted as a Special Focus Area as described in the original BAA, 06-19)

Without question, warfighters in the current era are required to master a large number of diverse skills spanning the range of cognitive and motor domains increasing rapid timeframes. Historically, measures of learning on key skills in the military environment have relied on qualitative and subjective assessments, often post-hoc, with little opportunity to redirect a learning experience mid-course. The operations tempo (OPTEMPO) of the Department of Defense mandates that warfighters acquire skills quickly, completely and with levels of proficiency that will prove robust in the most demanding conditions. In response to these challenges, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking innovative proposals to develop quantitative and integrative neuroscience-based approaches for measuring, tracking and accelerating skill acquisition and learning throughout the military. Recent discoveries in the field of neuroscience as well as advances in modeling and analysis techniques have laid the foundation for neuroscience-based strategies with the potential to dramatically accelerate the transition from novice to expert in key military tasks. This effort seeks to revolutionize learning in the military environment with the goals of creating reliable and quantitative methods for tracking task progression based on non-invasive measures of brain activity and producing a 2X faster progression in an individual's progress through stages of task learning.

BACKGROUND
In today's military, a substantial amount of skill development occurs through legacy training programs, developed over decades and based on group outcome measures with qualitative assessment as the norm. These interactions are not able to take into account the skill learning process of an individual, nor how that individual is tracking through the learning process. Although recent efforts have been made to create learning environments that closely simulate actual battle conditions, actual task execution often takes place in diverse and rapidly-changing battlefield environments that create unmatched demands on attentional and emotional systems in the brain. This effort will specifically evaluate what can be learned from neuroscience-based approaches in order to address this critical issue for the military.

In recent years, the field of neuroscience has begun to elucidate the brain mechanisms that are correlated with the transition from novice to expert. For example, differences in dominant oscillatory modes as well as changes in coherence and activity distribution have been noted during expertise development for a variety of tasks. While these advances have laid a solid foundation, many of these discoveries have emerged in static laboratory contexts that lack the full spectrum of sensory, cognitive, and limbic challenges that face warfighters on an ongoing basis. With the overall goal of operationalizing basic neuroscience discoveries, the Department of Defense is interested in investigating the neural substrates of novice and expert states, and principally, methods to reliably speed the progression to the latter.

The critical thrust of the program is to identify non-invasive interventions that will increase the speed of expertise development. These may include, but are not limited to, neurophysiologically-driven training regimens, neurally optimized stimuli, and stimulatory/modulatory interventions. Complementary components that will further attainment of this goal include the development of neurally-based techniques for maintenance of acquired skills, prediction of skill acquisition based on real-time neural activity, preferential brain network activation, and strategies for understanding the relationship between cognition and emotion in the domain of skill learning.

To attain these goals, proposals are requested for research plans based on understanding and optimizing brain function during task learning. This solicitation mandates the use of non-invasive sensors to assess brain states including, but not limited to, EEG (electroencephalography), MEG (magnetoencephalography), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), DTI (diffusion tensor imaging) and NIRS (near infra-red spectroscopy). Sensor combinations that leverage the strengths of complementary modalities to achieve the program vision are invited, although offerors should consider the long-term program goal of minimizing the footprint of deployed sensor systems. Designs for novel sensors will be considered as part of this effort only if they are proposed as a solution to address the stated technical goals.

Novel analytical methods for understanding and relating collected neural data are of interest as enablers of the goals for this program, provided these methods are introduced for uncovering physiological correlates, states or patterns that would otherwise be unmeasurable or otherwise computationally prohibitive.

Efforts that combine novel stimulus presentation combined with neural measurements will be considered. However, this program is not focused on the design of virtual reality or other stimulus-generation systems, except within the context of their neural effects. Submissions that include only stimulus presentation strategies or methods will not be considered. Proposals offering solutions whose focus is not neuroscience-centric will not be considered for award. Animal models may be considered as part of overall proposed efforts related to human expertise, however, animal-only research will not be considered. Similarly, while novel non-invasive stimulation methods fall within the scope of this program, proposals that include the use of ingested compounds [such as nootropes, nutraceuticals and other pharmaceuticals] will not be included.

It is expected that each research effort will consist of an interdisciplinary team with sufficient technical expertise and experience to develop novel yet rigorous approaches to the goal of accelerated learning. Offerors are encouraged to pursue their own teaming arrangements as desired - no recommendations or other facilitation for teaming will be provided by DARPA for this addendum. Highly-innovative submissions are welcome, although arguments for feasibility that are based on sound neurobiological principles are a necessity.

PHASE I DURATION, GOALS, AND MILESTONES
In order to transform basic neuroscience research into a capability for Defense applications, DARPA seeks proposals for Phase 1 efforts for 18 months or less, to achieve the following technical goals:

1) Establish quantitative, neuroscience-based definitions of task learning.

2) Define a trajectory based on neural activity that describes the transition from novice to expert state.

3) Demonstrate a positive impact on the transition to the expert state based on novel neuroscience approaches.

Throughout the Phase 1, efforts will be evaluated on the technical goals as stated above, and on mandatory program milestones as follows:

1) Establish baseline neural measures of the independent novice and expert states correlated and confirmed with task performance measures

2) Describe, at minimum, one interim brain state between novice and expert that is common to 80% of the subjects

3) Demonstrate a 2X acceleration in the progress of subjects between two interim stages in the novice to expert transition. A 2X acceleration between novice and expert final end-states is ideal, but not required for Phase 1.

Offerors to this program will be periodically assessed for progress towards the program milestones above, and demonstrations or other summaries of progress will be expected at a minimum of 6 months, 9 months and 12 months until the end of the effort.

DARPA program management will facilitate and encourage interactions with various Defense components throughout the program. However, the initial experimental tasks that will serve as the platform for experimentation in Phase 1 should be determined by the offerors and should be clearly stated and proposed as part of the effort. In Phase 1, tasks do not need to be intrinsically military in nature, although it is encouraged if offers have access to those resources. Offerors must validate that the skills under training are militarily relevant and not so clinical or abstract in nature that they cannot be clearly mapped to relevant skills.
Based on the success of Phase 1, there is the potential for a Phase 2 effort to mature successful demonstrations into prototype systems for transition to operational use. Proposers should outline a Phase 2 effort, and consider the necessary research and technical efforts to develop a successful prototype neuroscience-based system for eventual deployment in field, simulator, classroom, or office settings. A cost volume is not required for the Phase 2 description.

PHASE 1 FULL PROPOSAL FORMAT
The general format and content for the Phase I full proposal, including guidelines for the technical and cost volumes, follows the guidelines specified in for the main BAA06-19, that can be found at the website http://www.darpa.mil/baa/baa06-19pt2.html.

The technical section for the Phase I full proposal must include the following elements as part of a quantitative and integrative approach to measuring, tracking and accelerating learning mechanisms:

1) Concept Definition: Clearly describe the overarching concept for the proposed accelerated learning approach, including any novel theories or brain networks that underlie the research effort
2) Technical Analysis: Provide a detailed analysis of the rationale that supports the proposed concept for accelerated learning
a. Submissions must include a specific hypothesis of the anatomical, physiological or other biological changes in the central nervous system that will be targeted in novice-to-expert transitions. Physiological events outside the central nervous system (CNS) are of interest to the program only if they are concretely correlated with CNS changes.
3) Research Plan:
a. Proposals must contain clearly-defined experimental tasks that will allow neuroscience-based discrimination of novice states, expert states and the transition from the former to the latter. While military-specific content is not a requirement of the experiments, proposals should specify military skills that are correlates of non-military tasks.
b. Proposals should include basic details on the proposed experimental population, including criteria for categorizing subjects as novices or experts as well as elucidating sources of subjects with unique skills. Proposals should contain rough estimates of the number of subjects expected for each experiment.
c. The experimental design should include consideration of appropriate control techniques to distinguish expertise development from potential confounds such as immediate task performance.
d. If both animal and human experiments are proposed, animal studies should be presented in the context of their ultimate utility for the human component of the research.
e. Proposals should specify the quantitative measures that will demonstrate attainment of the Phase 1 goals. The emergence of metrics from single trial neural events is preferable, though not mandatory, for consideration. Similarly, while all robust CNS measurements are encouraged, methods that are suited for eventual non-laboratory use are especially welcome.
4) Project Milestones and Metrics:
a. Provide specific, quantitative milestones at intermediate stages of the program to assess progress towards meeting the Phase I milestones discussed above.
b. The proposed research effort should be delineated by specific tasks (NOT general research questions) and tasks should be clearly matched to the overall program timeline.
c. Proposals must include a clear and concise plan for demonstrating all program metrics, particularly the 2X faster transition between stages leading from the baseline (novice) state to the target (expert) state using neuroscience-directed intervention(s).
5) Team Composition: Provide a detailed listing of all institutions or entities proposed as collaborators on the effort. List their roles, responsibilities, and level of effort/contributions to specific tasks or milestones
6) Phase II Concept: Describe a concept for Phase II development based on successful completion of the Phase I research plan.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS ON COST VOLUME

In addition to the cost volume contents requested in http://www.darpa.mil/baa/baa06-19pt2.html, a budget based on total dollar effort for each technical task (detailed above) is expected.

Since integrated teams are preferred, a concise but complete delineation of any collaborator and subcontractor costs is expected ? for both total effort and contribution to each task.

If equipment is requested as part of the proposed effort, sufficient technical justification is required in the cost volume and its relationship to the technical effort must be detailed.

RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN/ANIMAL USE
Proposals selected for funding are required to comply with provisions of the Common Rule (32 CFR 219) on the protection of human subjects in research and the DoD Directive 3216.2. Please refer to BAA 06-19 (http://www.darpa.mil/baa/baa06-19pt2.html) for full details.

For submissions containing animal use, proposals should briefly describe plans for IACUC review and approval. Animal studies in the program will be expected to comply with the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, available at http://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/olaw.htm.
FULL PROPOSAL DEALINE
To receive consideration under this addendum, PROPOSALS MUST BE RECEIVED BY DARPA NO LATER THAN 1600 ET 20 November 2006, at the address shown below.

Address for Submission of Full Proposals:
DARPA/DSO
ATTN: BAA06-19, Addendum 6
3701 North Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22203-1714
E-Mail: baa06-19@darpa.mil

A website, http://www.sainc.com/dso0619/, has been established to facilitate the submission of full proposals electronically. This site will allow submission of contact information and uploading of a full proposal created with the requirements listed in this addendum and in accordance with BAA 06-19. Full proposals submitted by fax will not be accepted. The government reserves the right to fund all, some or none of the proposals under this BAA addendum. Additionally, the government reserves the right to fund the entire proposal, or selected portions thereof.

PROPOSAL EVALUATION
Evaluation of the proposals will be in accordance with the criteria in BAA06-19, found in Part II of the original BAA at http://www.darpa.mil/baa/baa06-19pt2.html. Evaluation factors are listed in decreasing order of importance. For general administrative questions, please refer to the original FEDBIZOPPS solicitation, BAA06-19, of February 8, 2006. http://www.darpa.mil/dso/solicitations/solicit.htm.


GENERAL INFORMATION:
In all correspondence, reference BAA06-19, Addendum 6.
Technical Point of Contact:
Amy Kruse, Defense Sciences Office, Phone: (571) 218-4338,
Email: amy.kruse@darpa.mil

Original Point of Contact:

Brett Giroir, Deputy Director, DSO, Phone (571) 218-4224, Fax (571) 218-4553,
Email: brett.giroir@darpa.mil

Point of Contact

Brett Giroir, Deputy Director, DSO, Phone (571) 218-4224, Fax (571) 218-4553, Email bgiroir@darpa.mil