Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is the research agency of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The Director of National Intelligence authorized it in 2006, modeled on DARPA "but focused on national intelligence rather than military needs," as a consolidation of the National Security Agency's Disruptive Technology Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's National Technology Alliance and the Central Intelligence Agency's Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. "In 2007, IARPA was stood-up in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as part of the 100-day plan establishing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)," and it was officially launched on October 1, 2007. It does not deploy technology to the field; it transitions the results of its research programs "to our IC customers for operational implementation."¹ Within ODNI it falls under the Deputy Director for Policy and Capabilities.²

Directors

Steven Nixon was appointed first acting director on June 1, 2007, and served until the launch on October 1, 2007, when Tim Murphy became second acting director. Lisa Porter, later deputy under secretary of defense for research and engineering and co-founder of the consulting firm LogiQ, was the first director, from February 1, 2008, to July 1, 2012. Peter Highnam, formerly director of research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, followed from August 30, 2012, to July 15, 2015. Jason Matheny, "a former PM," was director from August 3, 2015, to September 5, 2018, and later President Joe Biden's senior advisor on technology and national security and president of the RAND Corporation. Stacey Dixon, previously deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, served from September 5, 2018, to June 1, 2019, and was confirmed in 2021 as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence. The deputy director for research, Catherine Cotell, was third acting director from July 1 to November 19, 2019, and Catherine Marsh, a power-sources specialist, was director from November 19, 2019, to May 2024. Rick Muller of Sandia National Laboratories was appointed on April 17, 2024, and served until July 2025; Russell Miller was appointed seventh director in December 2025.¹

Program managers

"Since all IARPA PMs serve on a term-limited appointment, we have a constant influx of new PMs," the agency states, with more than 100 program managers and about 90 research programs since its founding. Former staff it names include Jill Crisman, later principal director for AI in the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering; Jinendra Ranka, who became director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office in February 2022; and Chris Reed, later chief innovation officer at Raytheon Applied Signal Technology.¹

Jeff Alstott was an IARPA program manager with a portfolio covering artificial intelligence, analytic methods, biosecurity, and science and technology forecasting, before posts at the National Science Foundation, the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy and at RAND.³ Adam Russell, a program manager at DARPA and IARPA who helped establish ARPA-H, was named chief vision officer of the U.S. AI Safety Institute on April 16, 2024.⁴ Dewey Murdick, an IARPA program manager and chief analytics officer and deputy chief scientist of the Department of Homeland Security, was on the founding team of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University, which Open Philanthropy launched in January 2019 with a 55 million dollar grant recommendation; the grant page described its leader, Matheny, as "former director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity."⁵

Forecasting

The Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program, solicited under broad agency announcement IARPA-BAA-10-05, sought "to dramatically enhance the accuracy, precision, and timeliness of intelligence forecasts for a broad range of event types, through the development of advanced techniques that elicit, weight, and combine the judgments of many intelligence analysts." Its prime performers were Applied Research Associates, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, George Mason University, Jacobs Strategic Solutions Group and the University of California, Berkeley.⁶ Run from April 23, 2011, to December 31, 2017, ACE "initiated a massive competition to identify cutting-edge methods to forecast geopolitical events," with millions of forecasts over four years. "The clear winner from this effort was Team Good Judgment, which went on to build the forecasting business, Good Judgment," the Good Judgment Project, and its principal investigator, Philip Tetlock, wrote Superforecasting on the basis of it. IARPA credits ACE with contributing "to the launch of an entire Superforecasting industry" and with the spin-off programs Open Source Indicators (OSI), CREATE and HFC; "the IC prediction market preceded ACE." A team in OSI, introduced in 2011, was the first to notify U.S. public health officials of the 2014 to 2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.¹

Other programs

IARPA's first program, Coherent Superconducting Qubits, ran from September 2009 to October 2014; Science named research of its Multi-Qubit Coherent Operations program the "Breakthrough of the Year" for 2010, and later quantum programs include Entangled Logical Qubits and LogiQ. Babel (2011 to about 2017) built speech recognition for underserved languages such as Pashto, Tamil and Igbo and produced the open-source Kaldi toolkit. High Frequency Geolocation (HFGeo), begun in 2011, improved the geolocation of high-frequency emitters, and its "classified sister program," Signal Location in Complex Environments (SLICE), launched the same year. IARPA joined the White House BRAIN Initiative announced in April 2013, was named in July 2015 to lead foundational research for the National Strategic Computing Initiative, and contributed its Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program, which sought to reverse-engineer "the brain's algorithms," to the Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing of October 2015. Its artificial intelligence programs include Trojans in Artificial Intelligence (TrojAI) and Microelectronics for AI (MicroE4AI). On August 1, 2026, it launched a Solutions Marketplace.¹