The Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) in Information Technology was created as a joint activity of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DOD) in late November 1998. At this time, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) was directed to establish an organizational unit to carry out the functions of ARDA.

Three strategic goals guide ARDA's program development:

• Focus on intelligence community problems with solutions that can be widely applied: maintain an operational problem focus and address solutions to problems that have broad effect on the intelligence community.
  
• Push the state of the art: address solutions to problems that entail high risk, but promise high pay-off.
  
• Provide depth rather than breadth: do a few key things deeply rather than many things in a shallow way.

Informedia's project "Question Answering from Errorful Multi-Media Data Streams" is sponsored by ARDA's AQUAINT Program . This seeks innovative, creative, high-risk, high-payoff research to achieve significant advancements in technologies and methods for advanced question answering against large heterogeneous collections of structured and unstructured information of multiple media and genre types (including structured and unstructured text, speech, document images, other multi- media) in English and multiple foreign languages, as well as video, images, geospatial, and abstract data.

The ultimate goal of the AQUAINT Program is not to develop question and answer capabilities for only single, isolated, factually based questions whose answers can be found as a single string or within a relatively short window of text (e.g. a 50 or 250 byte window) in a single document. Rather this R&D program intends to address a scenario in which multiple, inter-related questions are asked in a focused topic area by a skilled, professional information analyst who is attempting to respond to larger, more complex information needs or requirements. While some capabilities exist in these areas today, they are extremely limited and inadequate to meet the Government's broader requirements for question and answering. In addition, ARDA has a high interest in demonstrating the improved effectiveness achieved by combining the capabilities emerging from the R&D sponsored under the AQUAINT Program in an integrated, "plug-and-play" system environment.

Please visit the ARDA and ARDA AQUAINT sites for more details.