Behavioural Analytics Phase 2

Overview

DASA is looking for scientific and technological solutions that can provide context-specific insights into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of individual, group and population behaviour, enabling predictions about how they are likely to act in the future.

Scope

Following the progress of Phase 1, Phase 2 seeks to fund further development from proof of concept research into demonstrations that can show the art of the possible against challenges faced by defence and security practitioners.

DASA are looking for theoretical and technological developments, beyond proof of concept, to result in working models, tools and techniques that can be verified and validated against data sets with relevance to the defence and security operating environment.

In Phase 2 there are two challenge areas. These challenges will provide solutions to reliably understand and forecast attitudes and behaviours of individuals, groups and populations. It is important to note that these should not be viewed as rigid, singular challenges – they are not mutually exclusive. Your proposal must meet at least one of the challenges, but DASA welcome bids that address both where appropriate.

Challenge 1: How can we harness and analyse new sources of data to reliably understand and forecast behaviour in a defence and security context?

This challenge is looking for innovations that not only identify new sources of data but that can analyse this data to draw conclusions that are validated and verifiable.

DASA want to improve confidence levels in the relationships between data and behaviour (qualitatively and quantitatively) and develop game changing solutions to harness the value from the vast amount of data generated by humans.

Challenge 2: How can we help practitioners to understand and use insights from behavioural analytics in a defence and security context?

This challenge looks at how we can improve usability of results from Behavioural Analytics by an end user to help inform their decision making, including how we can calculate and communicate the relative reliability of the insight derived. It focusses on fundamental questions such as ‘What does useful mean?’, ‘Can I trust this data / advice / forecast?’, ‘What biases underpin these results?’ and from an end user perspective ‘What form of understanding do I really need?’

Full details of both challenges can be found in the competition document here.

Funding Costs

For this phase/competition, £2M is currently available to fund proposals.

• Completed proposals must comply with the financial rules set for this competition.
• The upper-limit for this competition is £250K (ex VAT).
• Funding will be provided over two financial years, and will be divided equally (upper limit of £125K for FY20-21 and £125k for FY21-22).
• Proposals will be rejected if the financial cost exceeds £250K total across FYs.

Exclusions

For this competition DASA are not interested in proposals that:

• constitute consultancy, paper-based studies or literature reviews which just summarise the existing literature without any view of future innovation
• are purely algorithmic and do not offer any insights into behaviour
• generic tools for big data and data analytics (such as filtering, storage or pattern recognition) are out of scope unless they are specifically shown to relate to the challenge of understanding or modelling human attitudes and behaviour.
• merge different data sets on the assumption it will add value but have no clear impact on behavioural analytics as a capability
• do not specifically relate to the challenge of deriving understanding and actionable insight into human behaviour from data
• are an identical resubmission of a previous bid to DASA or MOD without modification
• offer demonstrations of off-the-shelf products requiring no experimental development
• offer no real long-term prospect of integration into defence and security capabilities