Award Data

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 ...

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been supporting research of energetic materials and incendiaries as payloads for weapons to defeat targets containing chemical and biological agents. Several universities and Navy labs have been involved in this research, and have narrowed down on a few material formulations that are efficient biocides. These formulations contain a chemical ingredient ...

Surgical simulations aiming to support surgeon practices and medical education have attracted enormous research effort over the last two decades. However, the physical reality, especially on simulating aggregated tissue interaction, is still unsatisfactory. In this proposed work, an open source surgery simulation framework, SoFMIS, will be utilized and enhanced with tissue interaction models to a ...

This STTR Phase 1 project proposes development of a statistical relational learning framework for identification of the function of laboratory equipment from imagery. The proposed framework uses semantic reasoning to incorporate evidence from multiple classifiers and feature extractors, domain knowledge, and scene context for scene understanding and labeling. The Phase I effort will focus on imple ...

The modern warfighter faces the constant threat of endemic infections, multi-drug resistant bacteria and Biological Warfare Agents. In order to provide accurate front-line treatment that will curtail the overuse of antibiotics, a rapid and robust molecula

Establish a radiation-aware analysis capability in a commercial EDA design flow that will enable first-pass success in radiation-hardened by design (RHBD) for DoD ASICs in much the same way that existing EDA design suites ensure first pass functionality and performance success of complex ASICs destined for commercial applications. Layout-aware, calibrated single-event radiation models that captur ...

In resource limited settings, rapid and accurate diagnosis of infections is critical for managing potential exposures to highly virulent pathogens, whether occurring from an act of bioterrorism or a natural event. This is especially important for hard to detect intracellular bacterial and alphavirus infections, that overlap symptomatically and often treated empirically due to a lack of reliable an ...

MATSYS proposes to adapt emerging additive manufacturing techniques (so-called 3-D Printing) for use with reactive structural materials and demonstrate this capability to rapidly fabricate reactive case. Our concept incorporates two major manufacturing steps: 3D printing of green compacts from pure Al or Al-based reactive powder blend; and Microwave (MW) sintering of green compacts into net-shaped ...

MATSYS proposes to develop, test and evaluate a scalable metal-based reactive structural material that will self-fragment to micron or sub-micron scale fuel particles when subjected to explosive shock loading, resulting in significantly enhanced metal combustion efficiency. Use of reactive material casings offers the potential for several-fold increases in blast and overpressure by generating rapi ...