Just to be clear to others, Dan is the darpa PM on this - he convinced darpa internally it was worth funding other people to do the work, so he himself / his research group won't be doing this work. He's on leave from Rice for a few years to be a PM at DARPA's I2O.

And while DARPA doesn't directly care about research publications as an outcome, there's certainly a publishable research component to this, as well as a lot of lower papers-per-$ engineering and validation work. A lot of the contracts they hand out end up going to some kind of contractor prime (BBN, Raytheon, that kind of company) with one or more academic subs. The academic subs publish.