Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Biological Technologies Office (BTO)
Neural Engineering System Design (NESD)
Sponsor Deadline for Proposal Abstracts (highly encouraged): February 25, 2016
Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposals: April 14, 2016
OSP Deadline: 5 business days prior to submission
Award Information: Total funding up to approximately $60M will be awarded. The actual amount of resources available will depend on the quality of proposals received, successful achievement of milestones and availability of funds.
DARPA seeks proposals to design, build, demonstrate, and validate a neural interface platform capable of recording from more than 1,000,000 neurons and stimulating more than 100,000 neurons in proposer-defined regions of the human auditory, visual and somatosensory cortex. The complete system must demonstrate high-precision detection, transduction, and encoding of neural activity.
The NESD program is fundamentally an integrated systems design and innovation program that will require scientific and technical advances in two major Technical Areas (TA 1: Neural Transducers and Algorithms, and TA 2: Hardware, Prototyping, and Manufacture) to be fully integrated in a functioning system. The program is scheduled to span four years in three phases with critical milestones and deliverables expected in each phase. Successful NESD proposals must culminate in the delivery of complete, functional, implantable neural interface systems and the functional demonstration thereof.
DARPA is sponsoring Proposers Days for the potential proposer community on February 2-3, 2016 in Arlington, VA. Please note that registration for this event closes at noon on January 28, 2016. The Proposers Days objectives are to facilitate interaction between investigators that may have capabilities to develop elements of interest and relevance to NESD goals; and encourage and promote teaming arrangements among organizations that have the relevant expertise, research facilities and capabilities for executing research and development responsive to the NESD program goals. See here for more information about this event.
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