Award Data

Video Demonstration of the Phase I Prototype: http://youtu.be/P74Z5oNAo4c Purpose: This project will develop and test Kiko's Thinking Time, a series of game apps designed to strengthen children's cognitive skills related to executive functioning and reasoning. A principle objective of preschool is to prepare children for later success in school. Most programs focus on activities to support childr ...

Objectives and Intellectual Merit: The infrastructure of modern civilization is a set of complex systems1 that dynamically interact across multiple layers of abstraction. Researchers from many disciplines2 are designing analytical tools for predicting the global and local behaviors of these complicated, multi-layer networks. Easily usable, available (open source) and inter-operated tools are neede ...

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is critical to detect the proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges facing this objective include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions (e.g., gamma rays) from common radioactive isotopes behind shielding, and (b) cost-effe ...

Under a Phase II program, DRS Scientific will build, test, and deliver a new type of Acousto-Optic Tuned Filter (AOTF) hyperspectral imager that is compact, rugged, and inexpensive, has no moving parts, and is fast and sensitive. It will cover 8-12 micron wavelength range with 10 wavenumber spectral resolution or finer, and will have micro-Flick sensitivity with a cooled camera, and

The commercial marketplace has made tremendous advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technology and product maturity. VR is being used to enhance training in a number of areas including maintenance and operation of complex systems, but application of this technology to the training of dismounted soldiers has proven challenging. Fortunately, these advancements in VR technology now make possible the deve ...

The project team is developing and testing a prototype of PiGames, intended to be a game-based formative assessment system for physics. The prototype will include a curated collection of pre-existing assessments, authoring tools to create new assessments, a dashboard with progress monitoring, and teacher implementation support. In the Phase I pilot research with 6 classrooms and 180 high school st ...

This project team will develop and test a prototype of Moby.Read, a stand-alone app for handheld devices or tablets. Using Moby.Read, grade school students will read a passage out loud and the speech-recognition software will generate an assessment of oral-reading fluency in real-time. The app is intended to replace face-to-face oral reading assessments done by teachers in order to save teachers t ...

Over 50 million Indian households cook on a bio-mass fire and have unreliable or no electricity but are anxious to purchase an affordable power stove which will provide on-demand power and lighting to their homes. Annually, projected sales of the power stove could save sixteen million trees, reduce cooking fire particulates by 90%, reduce the two million premature deaths caused from indoor air pol ...

Environmental Fuel Research, LLC (EFR-LLC), has demonstrated the technical feasibility of separating fats, oils, and greases (FOG) from grease trap waste (GTW) and converting FOG to biodiesel that can meet ASTM specifications. GTW is a dirty and low-value waste from the food service industry that is high in FOG and currently is treated as a liability. The EFR-LLC process uses a bubble column react ...

This topic addresses the problem of robustly commanding and controlling unmanned ground vehicles operating in complex, unstructured environments. Current approaches to this task rely on dense scene reconstruction from a variety of sensor data such as LIDAR and video imagery. Scene representations are then relayed to a remote human operator who provides commands at varying levels of supervisory con ...