Phase 2 of DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge raises the bar for Collaborative Intelligent Radios

As teams gear up for Phase 2 of the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), Barone Consulting is providing infrastructure development and essential support.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

APRIL 10, 2018—Plans are well underway for Phase 2 of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2), with Barone Consulting working with DARPA to make the research problem more challenging and to enhance the scenarios, radio frequency (RF) emulation systems and scoring approach to spur greater collaboration.

Ten finalists from Phase 1 are moving up to Phase 2, while interested contenders are working on the Phase 2 hurdle—creating a machine learning enabled, software-defined radio system that can successfully move data across a simulated, virtual RF environment the; the design of which was overseen by Barone Consulting. Contestant designs are due on April 30.

SC2 is addressing a growing problem: the shortage of radio frequency bandwidth available to support the growing number of connected devices, from home computers to cell phones to soldiers on the battlefield, using these same frequencies to transverse the wireless communications highway.

“One of the problems in today’s radio spectrum, is that often two devices are trying to use the same frequency, but they aren’t able to function, due to their mutual interference,” explains Craig Pomeroy, senior consultant at Barone Consulting. “This is what happened when Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, two wireless technologies, became widely available. The goal of SC2 is for teams to make use of machine learning techniques to enable their devices to automatically figure out how to interoperate. This interoperability will massively increase the available usable spectrum for future services like the Internet of Things.”

As part of Phase 2, Barone Consulting is working with SC2 vendors to move beyond canonical RF problems and into real world sharing problems modeled on commercial and DoD spectrum users. This involves scaling up the size of networks and network interactions and retooling the scoring approach to ensure desired outcomes are rewarded; incumbent radio systems are protected, and to incentivize collaboration between networks when opportunities exist. “During Phase 1, we wanted the teams to develop a solid radio system that was fast and able to move lots of data,” says Pomeroy. “For this phase, we want the teams, like their radios, to work more closely and leverage efficiencies that can be achieved through collaboration.” Underpinning this effort, teams are developing intelligent reasoning engines, which rely on a shared collaboration language being developed by Barone and the teams.

After all the teams secure their spots, they will have until December 2018 to complete their designs, which will compete at SC2’s Second Preliminary Event at the end of the year. Winners of the Second Preliminary Event will advance to the final phase of competition in 2019, culminating in a Championship Event. The first-place winner of that event will receive a prize of $2 million; the second-place winner, $1 million; and the third-place winner, $750,00.

The programs Championship Event will be held in conjunction with the 2019 Mobile World Congress Americas annual conference and exhibition. The combined event is the result of a partnership between GSMA (the organization that represents mobile operators worldwide), and DARPA.

“Competitions like this one show how effectively research can be conducted in a results driven framework like the one Barone provides,” concludes Pomeroy. “The successes of this program can be attributed to the hard work of both the competitor teams developing the technology, and the government teams providing the infrastructure necessary to bring disparate research together in a way never before possible.”

About Barone Consulting

With an emphasis in areas such as autonomous systems, electronic warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cloud computing, Barone Consulting provides support to America’s leading scientists and engineers with a mission of tackling the toughest problems faced by the Department of Defense. Barone Consulting is a subcontractor to ECS for this effort.

Barone Consulting is actively recruiting and encourages strong candidates with Top Secret security clearances, systems integration, flight test, and aeronautical engineering to contact us regarding DARPA opportunities.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.barone.net

Colosseum opened to hosts DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Colosseum opened to hosts DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

Colosseum, the most powerful emulator of radio signal environments in the world opens with Barone’s help

MAY 12, 2017 – The team at Barone Consulting is thrilled to announce that one of their latest projects, Colosseum, is providing support for DARPA’s Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.

Barone Consulting provides solutions to some of the Department of Defense’s most pressing problems by supporting the country’s leading scientists and engineers in areas including autonomous systems, electronics warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cybersecurity. Now, Barone Consulting with Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and National Instruments has unveiled a large-scale RF testbed that is being used by DARPA to host their Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, with up to $3.75million dollars in prizes.

The Colosseum features a 256-by-256 channel RF channel emulator, giving it the ability to calculate and simulate 65,000+ channel interactions among 256 wireless devices in real-time. Each second, more than 52 terabytes of digital RF data flows through the Colosseum. This is more information held in the Library of Congress’ entire print collection.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) works to make technological breakthroughs for the benefit of national security, a mission that has been in the making since 1957. With the launch of Colosseum, DARPA is taking another great stride towards automating the wireless communications world by creating this massive emulation environment.

“Creating Colosseum is just the first step.” says President Kevin Barone, “The biggest reward will be seeing the 30 Spectrum Collaboration Challenge teams use this platform to develop next generation artificial intelligence enabled radio systems that will fundamentally change the way we use the RF spectrum. Colosseum will help usher in a wireless future where unimaginably rich information experiences are the norm.”

During the competition, SC2 competitors will work to create innovative radio systems that will have the capability to learn from each other in real-time. Achieving such success in the realm of radio-based artificial intelligence will render radio specifications obsolete. Colosseum is being described as a “path-breaking testbed” that will be able to emulate tens of thousands of interactions between wireless communication devices such as military radios, cell phones, internet-of-things devices, and more in a single square-kilometer area.

One especially unique component of the design has been integrating software defined radio technology and a cloud-like computing environment that is remotely accessible by teams. Placing a resource of this scale onto the cloud will be a first-in-the-world achievement.

Barone Consulting looks forward to continuing their DARPA support of SC2 over the next 3 years to advance how artificial intelligence can create solutions for a multitude of wireless communications challenges.

According to DARPA, “The Colosseum is a magnificent electronic arena and just what we and the SC2 teams need for testing innovative, collaborative, intelligent radios against one another.”

More information can be found at http://baronedc.com.

About Barone Consulting

With an emphasis in areas such as autonomous systems, electronics warfare, big data, geointelligence, and cybersecurity, Barone Consulting provides support to America’s leading scientists and engineers with a mission of tackling the toughest problems faced by the Department of Defense.

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DARPA Announces Next Grand Challenge – Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

On March 23rd, 2016 DARPA announced its next Grand Challenge at the International Wireless Conference Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Program Manager, Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), made the announcement to industry leaders following the conferences Dynamic Spectrum Sharing Summit. The challenge will motivate a machine learning approach to dynamically sharing the RF Spectrum and has been named the “Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.” A top prize of $2million dollars has been announced.

While mostly transparent to the typical cell phone or Wi-Fi user, the problem of spectrum congestion has been a long standing issue for both the commercial sector and Department of Defense. The insatiable appetite for wireless connectivity over the last 30 years has grown at such a hurried pace that within the RF community the term spectrum scarcity has been coined. RF bandwidth, the number of frequencies available to communicate information over, is a relatively fixed resource, and advanced communication systems like LTE and military communications systems consume a lot of it. As spectrum planners prepare for the next big wave of connected devices, dubbed the Internet of Things, they wonder where they will find the spectrum bandwidth they need to support these billions of new devices. Equally challenging, is the military’s desire to connect every soldier on the battlefield, while using these very same frequencies.

DARPA has chosen Barone Consulting to help develop the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge to address these critical infrastructure and military operation needs. In the tradition of other DARPA Grand Challenges, the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge provides an opportunity for experts across a wide variety of disciplines to devise groundbreaking strategies and systems and compete in open competition to win prizes, while advancing the state-of-the-art and seeding new technology communities. For the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, the tasks are to combine distributed sensing techniques, innovative RF transmit and receive technologies, and cutting edge machine learning algorithms to create radio networks capable of learning to collaborate with other unknown radio networks, in real time.

While working the problem of spectrum scarcity with DARPA, Paul Tilghman and Barone Consulting president Kevin Barone identified numerous shortcomings in conventional, human based spectrum planning techniques, which introduce significant inefficiencies into the allocation and reuse of frequency assignments. The realization that only the radios themselves have sufficient situational awareness of the RF environment surrounding them to be able to make transmitter and receiver assignments efficiently, combined with limited insight into the interference one radio exposes to another, dramatically reduces the number of options available to a spectrum planner. Considering that oftentimes spectrum planning occurs months, and sometimes years ahead of the radios’ actual use, it became clear that only by moving the planning process into the radio itself, could true real-time spectrally optimized solutions be realized.

Barone Consulting is very proud and excited to be part of this groundbreaking effort, which promises to revolutionize how spectrum is managed, while unleashing underutilized RF resources to the advantage of the commercial and military user. As we continue our work executing this program and overseeing the development of these new systems, we look forward to getting to know the teams and the remarkable technologies they will be developing.

Barone Consulting is actively recruiting and encourages strong candidates with Top Secret security clearances, systems integration, RF, machine learning, and national test bed experience to contact us regarding DARPA opportunities.

Information about Barone Consulting can be found at www.baronedc.com

Information about the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge can be found at www.spectrumcollaborationchallenge.com

The original DARPA press release can be found at www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-03-23

About Barone Consulting

Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting provides system engineering and technical assistance services to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. They provide a cadre of elite subject matter experts to the government in support of game-changing, cutting edge technologies that help performers bridge the “valley of death” between R&D and fielded tactically relevant products. To find out more, please visit www.baronedc.com

First successful integration of the PCAS system with an MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft

Meet the Successful Consulting Team behind DARPA’s PCAS Latest Demonstration

They worked in the shadows providing testing and technical assistance to DARPA for the PCAS weapon test.

Barone Consulting is proud to announce the successful completion of a networked Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS) combat capabilities test on an MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft. Two members of Barone Consulting, Marshall Frith and Scott Ponsor, were actively involved in the system integration and test of the PCAS program, which came to a successful completion on 27^th March.

The demonstration, which took place in the southwest region of the United States, marked the first successful integration of the PCAS system within a USMC aircraft. Right from the planning to the execution, the demonstration was a big success that wouldn’t have been possible without the teamwork of every person involved.

PCAS, which is the brainchild of Defense Advanced Research Program Agency (DARPA), is an improvement on the existing close air support capabilities (CAS). Unlike CAS, which relies heavily on voice instructions and paper maps, PCAS leverages advances in computing and communication technologies to deliver reliable coordination between ground forces and aircrews.

In creating PCAS, DARPA envisions an all-digital close air support system. The system constitutes of two main components: PCAS-Air and PCAS-Ground.

PCAS-Air consists of a GPS enabled system that uses high-speed internet connections and sophisticated algorithms that are able to calculate the optimal path to the target as well as recommend the best weapon to deploy once the targeted is identified and selected.

PCAS-Ground, a suite of situational awareness and mapping software on Android tablet computer. Information can also be visualized using a HUD eyepiece that displays imagery, maps, and other information about the target, letting the troops keep their eyes on the target, not the tablets. PCAS-Ground has already been put to the test in Afghanistan, where it quickly proved a significant success. The units in Afghanistan replaced paper maps with PCAS-Ground and reported increased and improved agility as well as precise coordinate air engagements.

PCAS not only makes Close Air Support prompt and precise but also enables the employment of small munitions, something which greatly reduce collateral damage.

The successful prototyping of PCAS on the MV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft opens doors to a larger discussion on modern CAS within the Department of Defense. Barone Consulting, which is one of the most remarkable systems engineering and technical assistance firms in the United States, hopes to play a crucial role in the future advancement of the PCAS program.

About Barone Consulting
Founded in 2009, Barone Consulting, provides technical assistance and system engineering services to the Department of Defense and the intelligent community. They offer a cadre of elite subject matter experts to the government in support of game-changing, cutting edge technologies.

PCAS scores success with USMC leadership

Marshall Frith and Scott Ponsor have been working on DARPA’s PCAS project which has just recently completed a weapons demonstration for the MV-22 tiltrotor aircraft. The program has lead to several transitioning technologies and has opened a larger discussion of modern CAS technology within the DoD.

On March 27, DARPA successfully tested the full PCAS prototype system for the first time as part of TALON REACH, a U.S. Marine Corps infantry/aviation training exercise conducted in the southwest region of the United States in partnership with the Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics Squadron One and the Marine Infantry Officer Course (IOC). The demonstration marked the first successful integration of automated, digital, real-time coordination capability into a military aircraft system, including rail-launched munitions, digital data links and advanced software in support of ground forces.“I am very pleased with the successful PCAS demonstration that we had during TALON REACH,” said Lt. Gen. Jon M. Davis, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation. “I have emphasized to my team that we will network every one of our aircraft.”

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-04-06

Barone Awarded DARPA I2O Taskorder

WASHINGTON, DC – June 25, 2014 – The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Barone Consulting a 3-year task order to provide Scientific, Engineering, and Technical Assistance (SETA) to its Information Innovation Office (I2O).

“Barone Consulting is excited to continue its relationship with DARPA as we work on these exciting and innovative projects,” says Kevin Barone, president and CEO of Barone Consulting. “Our track record has shown our success in assisting with these vitally important systems that protect our military and intelligence efforts.”

DARPA aims to sustain the U.S. military’s technological dominance by creating strategic surprise for the country’s enemies. In the new task order, Barone Consulting with help DARPA I2O, the group responsible for anticipating rapid changes in military information science and software. The project will include framing, executing, and transitioning cyber, analytics, and computing research and development projects with a goal to create cutting-edge systems and technologies.

Barone Consulting has a strong history of working with DARPA’s many divisions, including I2O, to create game-changing technology and scientific advancements. They will partner with Schafer Corporation on this project.

Barone Awarded Task Order on NGA’s InnoVision program

WASHINGTON, DC – June 11, 2014 – The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has awarded Barone Consulting a task order to provide scientific research to the InnoVision Future Solutions Program.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has awarded Barone Consulting a task order to provide scientific research to the InnoVision Future Solutions Program.

IFSP provides support for the research and implementation of innovative science to solve the intelligence community and Department of Defense’s most complicated problems. IFSP also explores the newest scientific discoveries, including the prominent current research of LIDAR, or the use of laser technology to create three-dimensional geospatial maps. NGA and IFSP plan to use the remote sensing ability of LIDAR to capture laser information and gather geospatial information for a variety of new projects.

“This new technology gives us a whole new look at the world and our ability to gather data,” says David Kalin, Barone Consulting senior scientist. “By using 3D laser technology, we can get finer and more accurate geospatial data that can be used in all sorts of areas. This is a huge breakthrough and a great opportunity.”

As part of the contract, Barone Consulting will have a heavy presence in the development and application of LIDAR mapping. They will also work with Booz Allen to provide engineering and technical assistance on IFSP’s many other areas of study. The task order will last until 2017.

Barone Aids in Innovative Firefighting Training

WASHINGTON, DC – May 29, 2014 – Barone Consulting today orchestrated a successful demonstration of DARPA technology for Arizona firefighters, effectively expanding the use of military technology to other public service areas.

Team members, including Barone Consulting integration architect Marshall Frith and senior consultant Scott Ponsor, used elements from the Persistent Close Air Support (PCAS) program that were tailored for the firefighting community in a program called Fire Line Advanced Situational Awareness for Handhelds (FLASH).

“To see the application of this program to areas besides the military was fascinating,” Frith says. “We’ve been working to give our troops the tools they need in battle, and to see those tools translate to firefighting was very rewarding. The applications of this program are nearly limitless.”

PCAS is a program designed for the military with a goal to use advanced digital tools to overcome troop coordination challenges. By equipping soldiers with targeted technology for situational awareness, rather than paper maps and legacy communications systems, troops can more easily stay coordinated and ahead of the enemy.

Firefighters battling wildfires face similar challenges to troops in battle, including the need for situational awareness, precise coordination, and ensured safety from quickly moving and shifting flames. Advanced technology to fight these problems has not been readily available to most rural firefighters, until the aid of DARPA and PCAS.

FLASH, the firefighter version of PCAS, uses tablets, aircraft-mounted sensors and radios designed to identify the location of every firefighter and aircraft in expansive fire zones. The systems overlays multiple streams of information onto a digital map visible on tablet computers. In essence, FLASH gives every member of the firefighting team a real-time map of the flames and their resources, allowing them to more easily plan where the next attack will be.

During the three-day training demonstration with the Prescott Fire Department, firefighters were able to track each other’s positions with the help of an observation aircraft that provided a live, bird’s-eye view of the terrain. Frith worked with local fire officials to demonstrate and train on the tablet software and communications program. Ponsor facilitated a virtual connection, allowing participants in the Arizona command post and in DARPA headquarters in Virginia to view the event in real time.

“This technology is incredibly powerful,” Ponsor says. “Its ability to not only unite firefighters in troubling rural situations but to bring together people across the country is remarkable. It was an honor to be part of such a project.”

Members of the Prescott Fire Department, who were chosen for the exercise because of the heroic action of the 19 firefighters who gave their lives in the Yarnell Hill wildfire last year, were impressed with FLASH technology and hopeful the devices could be tailored for other areas, such as search and rescue efforts.

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-06-09

Barone Sponsors “Carpenter’s Shelter” Homeless Charity

Barone Consulting is a proud sponsor of the 12th Annual Carpenter’s Shelter of Alexandria “Carpenter’s Cook Off” at the Birchmere Music Hall on Sunday, April 27.

An on-going culinary tradition in Alexandria, over 25 restaurants will compete to raise money for and awareness of Carpenter’s Shelter. As the largest homeless shelter in Northern Virginia, Carpenter’s Shelter provides support for over 1,000 homeless and formerly homeless children and adults each year.

Tickets and online silent auction bids are still available for this year’s fundraising event at www.carpenterscookoff.com.

The Carpenter’s Shelter mission is to help the homeless achieve sustainable independence through shelter, guidance, education, and advocacy. The Catalogue for Philanthropy recognized Carpenter’s Shelter in 2013 by including them in their Guide to Giving Report for the DC metropolitan area. To learn more about Carpenter’s Shelter and how to support its mission through donations or volunteerism, please visit http://www.carpentersshelter.org/.

BLADE Phase 2, Completes Test & Evaluation Program

Washington, DC (February 18, 2014) Barone Consulting, as the technical SETA support to the DARPA BLADE Program, successfully executed the Phase 2 Test & Evaluation activities which culminated in the selection of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Lab in Cherry Hill, NJ as the Phase 3 performer.