Uncle Sam wants feedback on where to spend as much as $200 million for research in AI, security, emulation and photonics. Registration closes July 6 for a Silicon Valley event later this month where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold four parallel workshops open to the public to brainstorm on directions in the fields.

The half-day workshops, led by DARPA program managers, will include expert talks on the state-of-the-art in the field followed by open discussions of where to focus future research programs. The pathfinding effort is a next step in DARPA’s broad Electronics Resurgence Initiative, now spending about $300 million a year across six multi-year projects that aim to serve both commercial and military applications.

The AI workshop will gather hardware and software experts, seeking ideas for research in the field that has already spawned many designs from startups and established companies. The security session will explore gaps in hardware capabilities a future DARPA project could fill.

The emulation session aims to find ways to reduce system-emulation time by orders of magnitude. It is led by Andreas Olofsson who recently unveiled two new ERI programs on chip design. The photonics workshop will explore design, fabrication and packaging of photonic links at the chip level as well as their implications for sensors, wireless and quantum systems.

The half-day workshops will be followed by an optional two-day event describing six DARPA projects launching this year. It also will sport keynotes from senior executives of Alphabet, Applied Materials, Cadence, Intel, Nvidia and Synopsys among others.