IARPA’s Hush-Hush Projects

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  ProjectsAtWork  

Though its advanced research efforts are strictly “hush-hush,” a government agency is rather publicly seeking project and program excellence to oversee high-risk, high-payoff national security initiatives.

With the ninth anniversary of 9/11 just days ago, questions of national security flooded the media and became top of mind among U.S. citizens. But such concerns wax and wane with the changing news of the day, and Americans’ attention will go elsewhere.

That is not the case among project and program managers working with Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. IARPA is a College Park, Md.-based government agency founded to invest in high-risk, high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide a major intelligence advantage over future adversaries.

These execs live and breathe national security through innovative projects that have a futuristic feel. Consider Reynard, a project to study avatars in the virtual world to learn how people in hostile cultures relate to one another and to determine whether such people use electronic realms to communicate about their real-life terrorist plots. Another project, ALADDIN, aims to find the proverbial needle in the haystack by creating automated ways to sift through massive amounts of video images collected by intelligence agencies to key in on valuable data.

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