ACM TechNews

Q&A With: IARPA Director Lisa Porter

IEEE Spectrum (05/08) Adee, Sally

Lisa Porter is the inaugural director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), whose mission is the development of high-risk, high-payoff technologies for U.S. intelligence agencies. IARPA is due to announce its division into three program offices--Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe and Secure Operations--that Porter says will collectively cover the whole of the intelligence challenge, and that will respectively focus on improving the value of collected data, maximizing the insight drawn from collections in a timely manner, and countering foes' ability to adversely affect U.S. intelligence's effective networking operations. Porter says the decision to site IARPA at the University of Maryland, College Park, partly came from a desire to send a message that the organization is academic friendly and engaged in the community. She says she is applying an insight she picked up at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to her IARPA tenure: The recognition that the justification for starting programs must be based on a solid concept as well as with capable program managers. "I anticipate that since the problems we'll be addressing are very hard, we'll be advancing technology capabilities, and that will spill over into commercial or private-sector applications," Porter says. She notes that IARPA is on the lookout for program managers, and that part of the strategy involves spreading the word through community engagement, while the IARPA.gov Web site will post application information once it is up by the end of May. "We're looking for very smart people who understand what it takes not just to technically comprehend a problem but how to bring an idea to reality programmatically," Porter says.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6208

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