Award Data

Spark proposes to develop a transformative heat-to-electricity conversion device based on thermionic energy conversion for portable power, unmanned systems and other military / commercial applications. Thermionic energy conversion has the potential to leapfrog competing solid-state conversion in efficiency and power density, but has been largely neglected for decades. The proposed research is a un ...

In Phase II of AQUIRE, we will develop a prototype document background generation and management system that can be used by analysts and decision makers to access information gathered from a wide variety of unstructured sources about entities, relations, and complex situations. This system will be able to (1) construct topically organized entity corpora which are automatically supplemented with st ...

This proposal for continued Phase II implementation, evaluation, and transition of the Adaptive Feature Oriented Recommendation Engine (AFORE). Social media is an increasingly important source of time-critical information for a range of problems including monitoring information operations carried out by adversaries, analyzing terrorist propaganda, and obtaining situational awareness in post-disast ...

The main objective of this Phase II.2 DARPA SBIR proposal is to develop a robust and reliable electrical connection strategy for softening implantable electrode arrays and industry standard connectors for use in chronic animal models at research facilities throughout the world. The Phase II.2 base period consists of two tasks: 1) to connect softening neural interfaces to wire-based and flexible po ...

A staggering number of microbes on Earth (99%) are not culturable using standard laboratory methods. These microbes are called “unculturable”. Microbes not grown and studied in laboratories are uncharacterized and may be a source of useful biological products and molecules. Unculturables have been found in many sample types and environments. Furthermore, characterization of these organisms wil ...

A significant challenge in extracting event attributes from unstructured text is that events possess a wide array of attributes which affect decision making. In a single document, an author may describe events that have happened (realis), did not happen or could have happened (irrealis), and that may happen in the future. They may describe events which reflect a generic class of occurrences, or a ...

CONCUR develops a computational framework for assessing and characterizing urban environments stability or fragility in response to volatility and stress, identifying specific weaknesses as well as key tipping points which could lead to rapid systemic failure. CONCUR explicitly models urban environments as emergent complex systems, focusing attention on the critical triggers that could lead to rap ...

Nanohmics Inc. in collaboration with Dr. Andrea Al propose to develop and experimentally demonstrate ultra-compact nonlinear-plasmonic all-optical switches and isolators that exploit sharp asymmetric plasmonic-resonances observed in sub-wavelength metasurfaces. Devices will be comprised of plasmonic gratings that couple light into Long Range Surface Plasmons (LRSPs). The gratings are engineered to ...

Ziva’s proposed Ultra Nonlinear Plasmonics (TALON) technology addresses the critical DoD need to miniaturize tunable and non-linear photonic, on-chip components and devices. Ziva’s TALON modulator exploits composite metamaterials both for its waveguide section cladding layers and for the non-linear interaction sections. The former effectively reduces the propagation loss of TALON’s ultra-con ...

This STTR will develop atomically precise fabrication and measurement technology that will enable a new experimental regime to study the physics of strongly correlated quantum systems.The fabrication techniques are based primarily on Hydrogen Depassivation Lithography (HDL) which uses Scanning Tunneling Microscope technology to create atomically precise patterns of H on a Si (100) 2x1 surface in a ...