The Defense Advanced Research Property Agency (DARPA) created the DARPA Open Catalog website to share specifics of projects that it supports. This is a move that aims to demonstrate the openness of U.S. intelligence and defense.
The research community has been asking the government for access to DARPA's various projects and the agency responded by posting the open source catalog that contains details of over 60 of its sponsored projects belonging to its XDATA program. A good number of projects included in the curation are useful for managing big data sets such as the Vowpal Wabbit. The agency also sponsors development of new languages for programming. The codes are made available for anyone to build on as well as foster collaboration and encourage innovation in the community of developers.
While DARPA, operating under the umbrella of the Department of Defense, is primarily tasked with developing technologies that will give the United States overwhelming advantage against its enemies, it also ventures into technological experiments that end up for public consumption such as the GPS and the Internet.
"Making our open source catalog available increase the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government. DARPA program manager. "Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products," said DARPA program manager Chris White.
The initial catalogue of software and publications can be expanded by the agency in the future. Updates might include components from different programs such as the Broad Operational Language Translation and Visual Media Reasoning.
The Open Catalog site is very simple and organizes the different XDATA projects into a table where one can see the teams involved in the development of specific software and leads users to Github where most of the codes are posted.
"If the R&D community shows sufficient interest, DARPA will continue to make available information generated by DARPA programs, including software, publications, data and experimental results," the Open Catalog site states.
DARPA might have initiatives that are deemed top secret but it also has projects that make it endearing to the public such as its DARPA Robotics Challenge where RoboSimian, a gorilla-like machine by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab excelled. The robotics challenge aim to find robots that can help during the aftermath of natural disasters or be used in very hostile or extreme conditions.
