The Office of National Intelligence runs a small research program on very broadly defined national security issues. Some read like script outlines for a new series of Black Mirror. Others are about Himalayan-high tech of the what-could-possibly-go-wrong kind.
The ten newly announced grants, each of just under $800,000 are:
- Matthew Spence and colleagues (ANU): “Researching artificial intelligence tools in synthetic biology to jointly identify harmful biological sequences that are invisible to current detection methods, and rapidly generate prophylactics that can neutralise sudden or emerging biological hazards”
- Damia Mawad and John Daniels (UNSW): “Creating energy harvesters with optimised electrical output (with) the potential to power covert wearable devices indefinitely, eliminating batteries and enabling persistent intelligence-gathering and health monitoring through continuous power generation from breathing, walking, and physiological processes”
- Kristian Helmerson et al (Monash U): “Microscale probes for magnetic detection of brain activity … a new approach to interrogating brain function, diagnosing neurological disorders, and for brain-machine interfaces.”
- Kristina Murphy and Keiran Hardy (Griffith U): “New insights into the drivers of sovereign citizen extremism and practical strategies to help authorities identify, manage, and mitigate threats.”
- Scott Brown, Ami Eidels (Uni Newcastle): Understanding cyber-hackers’ thinking and decision making. Expected outcomes include; “process-level theory of attacker behaviour which can generate precise and actionable predictions”
- Nicholas Fay (UWA) Andre Perfors, Piers Howe, Yoshihisa Kashima (Uni Melb): “How cultural differences shape the success or failure of social influence campaigns … “the expected outcome is a method for creating culturally informed campaigns that are more effective and reliable across diverse populations, supporting the national intelligence community in avoiding cultural missteps and unintended effects.”
- Thomas Aechtner, Laura Ferris, Charles O’Quinn (Uni Queensland): An analysis of Australian pseudo-law and Sovereign Citizen disinformation to “identify exemplar narratives, detailing their plotlines and how they tend to cohere around shared religious ideas and sacred ideals (the) project will generate ethnographic and narrative analytical maps that can be leveraged to counter such disinformation.”
- Michael Haugh, Samuel Hames, Charles Kemp (Uni Queensland): “Formal interactional data models that address the dialogic properties of communication, which can then be used as a blueprint for re-engineering topic and sentiment analytics”
- Timothy Cubitt and colleagues (Adelaide U): Evidence and response to the connection between extremism, child sexual exploitation and domestic violence
- Nicholas Reynolds et al (RMIT): “Battery-free, wireless energy harvesting materials that convert body movement into power for wearable devices such as biometric sensors and covert intelligence gathering devices.” Useful for in-field intelligence officers
Now these are academics who get how to write a National Interest Statement.