Expressions of Interest for the National Intelligence Discovery Grants Program are open projects with funding commencing in 2025. EoIs close 24 September 2024.
Funded by the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), the program is administered by the ARC.
Investigators must be an Australian Citizen, Permanent Resident or NZ Special Category Visa Holder. Chief Investigators must be employed at an eligible Australian university.
$400,00 – $800,000 over 3 years is available for projects that address at least one and up to three Intelligence Challenges:
- covert collection – The ability to access and collect intelligence from people, imagery, signals, or emanations, signatures, nodes, networks (including IoT environments) and transactions with a low probability of detection and/or attribution. The ability to degrade or defeat adversary collection and cyber capabilities to safely move people, information and equipment into, out of, and through environments with low signature and likelihood of detection and/or attribution.
- space-based – The ability to leverage low cost and innovative technological advancement in space-based and high altitude capabilities in a timely manner to improve collection, communication and analysis capabilities.
- identity management – The ability to quickly, accurately and uniquely identify individuals from all types of data (online,
surveillance, biometric, speech, behavioural, forensic, text, etc.), including where the data has low linkages to real world identities. The ability to mask or obfuscate the identity of an individual from adversaries where access to online, surveillance, biometric, forensic or other data is available. - emerging biological science – The ability to develop methodologies, techniques, services and devices from emerging biological technologies to provide new or alternate options to meet existing and future intelligence mission objectives. The ability to detect, identify, analyse, counter, defeat and prosecute threats from emerging biological technologies, in a safe and timely manner. The ability to exploit advances in machine learning to enable the above.
- emerging material science – The ability to develop methodologies, techniques, services and devices from emerging material
technologies to provide new or alternate options to meet existing and future intelligence mission objectives. Identification, development and employment of new or novel materials with unique properties, including rare earths and complex alloys, to gain technical, performance and cost benefits. The ability to exploit advances in machine learning to enable the above. - cyber security, protective security and offensive cyber – The ability to ensure the security and integrity of sensitive and classified information whilst enabling flexible/remote working and crisis response. The ability to predict, prevent, detect, attribute, respond and recover from cyber incidents and malign online interference (foreign, domestic, insider) at a national scale. The ability to conduct offensive cyber and informational activities to disrupt emerging security threats.
- human behaviour and influence – The ability to identify and understand actors’ psychologies, social identities, narratives and behaviours that constitute a threat to Australia’s security. The ability to mitigate and counter the cultural, psycho-social and organisational drivers and antecedents to national security threats. The ability to influence target audiences to elicit information, affect behaviour or shape preferences.
- data-driven and real-time analytical – The ability to employ advanced machine learning, natural language technologies and data science techniques to autonomously (or semi-autonomously) identify, extract, fuse and disseminate meaningful intelligence from large, disparate, sparse and/or incomplete data sets, including linguistic (text, speech, etc), geospatial, financial, signals, identity and other relevant data sets. The ability to do this at the speed and scale required to meet emerging threats.
- situation awareness and multi-source assessment – The ability to analyse and assess significant events and trends that impact on Australia’s national security and interests (including political, strategic, environmental and economic developments as well as trends in adversarial behaviour, capability or investment in S&T). The ability to collaboratively analyse and synthesise evidence from multiple sources, and across multiple agencies, to produce timely, high quality and influential intelligence reports and assessments. The ability to articulate the basis and level of confidence in assessments.
Documents
NIDG 2025 – Guidelines: NIDG Grant Guidelines 2024 edition
NIDG 2025 – Intelligence Challenges: ID25 Intelligence Challenges
