Award Data

Semiconductors electronics is integral to America’s economic and national security as manifested by the CHIPS act. Ever-increasing materials requirements for semiconductor R&D, combined with the advent of machine learning, and availability of materials databases, pose a need to understand and exploit these methods for acceleration of the materials and manufacturing lifecycle. The proposal aims t ...

From 2012-2015 the world’s first printed amperometric gas sensors were developed at KWJ Engineering Inc. as the subject of an NSF SBIR. The patented technology was used to found SPEC-sensor LLC and obtain commercial funds. More than one million sensors have been sold using SPEC’s patented designs, which led to the recent acquisition by Interlink Electronics, Inc. The next challenge is to grow ...

Over a decade ago, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) invented a cold cathode electron field emitter with the potential to disrupt the state of the art for imaging and communications systems. NIST showed that these devices, comprising nanoporous silicon carbide structures of various hierarchical shapes, can emit electrons from their surfaces purely by applicati ...

In this proposed Phase II effort we will implement a software framework that will reduce the time required to annotate large image/video datasets by a factor of 100x while also reducing the data necessary to train state of the art computer vision models by up to 80%. Our strategy combines several elements and ideas. First, we have developed a sub-tile based a priori theory of how and why CNNs can ...

In Phase I we developed and demonstrated a bi-directional, monolithic, High-Speed, Electro-optic shutter for Range Gated Imaging. While meeting the majority of the key performance parameters for Range-Gated Imaging at high Pulse Repetition Frequency, improvements can be achieved in transmission, contrast and reliability. The Phase Ii activity begins with a upgraded Electro-optic Shutter incorpora ...

Recent advances in technologies have shown great potential for widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in real-time Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications. However, the massive amounts of data collected and generated from ITS sensors pose a major challenge in data processing and transmission. This requires a shift from centralized repositories and cloud computing t ...

According to a recent survey, 178 million trips are taken across U.S.’s 46,000 structurally deficient bridges every day. Due to concerns over their actual load-carrying capacity, some of these bridges have posted weight and speed restrictions. The lack of enforcement of these load postings is an issue nationwide and presents risks for human lives and costly failures. To address this issue, this ...

Curing concrete properly is essential for strength gain and durability. While the importance of curing is widely known, all too often curing is not properly executed in practice. This proposal outlines a sensing system that will have three functions: · to record the weather conditions during the concrete placement. · to document how the implemented curing impacts a known concrete system. · to p ...

Food deserts are among the major contributing factors to food insecurity. There are more than 6,500 food desert tracts in the U.S., home to 23.5 million Americans. Rural food deserts are more than 10 miles from the nearest grocery store, and this distance poses extraordinary challenges for those who do not have a vehicle or cannot drive. In urban food deserts, people's grocery store inaccessibilit ...

Optimizing demand for available transportation infrastructure is desirable for the Department of Transportation and Federal Transit Administration, local and regional agencies, private organizations, and individuals. Unfortunately, traditional Transportation Demand Management (TDM) efforts fail to facilitate cooperation between actors, and rely heavily on marketing and financial incentives to infl ...