This is a true story … of six teams of innovators … picked to live in a house … to work together on national security issues … to find out what happens … when people stop being polite … and start getting real (innovative) … The DARPA Innovation House.
Taking a page from MTV – sort of – DARPA has moved six teams of innovators into a home at George Mason University’s Arlington, Va., campus for eight weeks of collaboration and research.
The program aims to provide a focused residential research environment for six teams in the area of extracting meaningful content from large volumes of varied visual and geospatial media.
The selected teams receive $50,000 to cover expenses and time over the eight weeks.
“This experiment allows thinkers from diverse fields to zero in on focused area of research for eight weeks,” said Mike Geertsen, DARPA program manager and the force behind the Innovation House Study.
He continued, “We are examining how collaboration among different disciplines can yield game-changing technologies. For instance, our participants include computer engineers, data architects and imagery analysts. We have thrown them in with a robotics expert from NASA, visual artists and neuroscientists. If this model proves to be successful, it represents a new means of tackling some of the hard problems in government-sponsored research.”
