Award Data

Proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons is a serious threat. Prevention of their spread has reached a state of heightened urgency in recent years. One of the ways to passively determine the presence of nuclear weapons is to detect and identify characteristic signatures of highly enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium. Neutrons and gamma rays are two signature ...

The ability to track small vessels is critical to national security, but not easily accomplished due to the sheer volume of craft and the range of environments which they operate within. The introduction of smart-phones with location, orientation, camera, and Internet capabilities is enabling collaborative applications that have strong locative potential. These devices are capable of acting as bas ...

The detection of neutrons is a critical capability for the identification of special nuclear materials in homeland security applications. Both plutonium and uranium can be detected by their neutron signatures. Next-generation detectors should efficiently detect fission neutrons, even in a high background of gamma rays. Neutron detection systems consisting of 3He have found widespread use due to th ...

Detection of bioaerosols is a cornerstone in the protection of our nation from bioterrorist and pandemic events. Rapid bioaerosol detection systems have advanced dramatically in recent years, but the lack of integratable automated sample preparation for these systems remains a major deficiency. Three significant issues are (a) a lack of an interface between large environmental samples and sample p ...

The overall goal of this project is to develop new tools and techniques to address current limitations in mobile forensics. Many factors, including NAND Flash memory, passcode protected phones, encrypted data, lack of device support and simplistic analysis techniques in current forensic tools drive the need for advancements in mobile forensic tools. Phase I of this project was highly successful ...

This multiphase project develops higher heat resistant materials for use in face shields of self-contained breathing apparatuses (SCBAs) and brings them to commercial markets. Key findings of the Phase I work are that polyethersulfone (PES) is a promising replacement for polycarbonate (PC) with respect to thermal and optical properties. However, PES has considerably lower mechanical impact strengt ...

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear missiles and “dirty bombs” is a serious threat in the world today. Preventing the spread of these nuclear weapons has reached a state of heightened urgency in recent years, more so since the events on September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. Gamma-ray spectrometers are an important tool in monitoring the proliferation of nuclear wea ...

Member of the Family LLC's proposal is designed to study and analyze the effects of contact lens usage, eye surgery and various types of pupil dilation as they relate to the accuracy and performance of iris recognition systems. Additionally we propose to determine whether or not appropriate measures exist or can be created to mitigate the effects of these factors in iris recognition. While others ...

SSC proposes a low power tri-axial acoustic sensor that leverages our existing acoustic chambered design to provide a directional sensor that has high sensitivity, rugged construction with low power consumption. Our approach extends prototypes developed under DoD sponsorship, including DARPA, Army, Navy and Special Forces efforts. Our innovative chambered design provides a large physical apertur ...

To address the DHS need for intelligent symbology technologies, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to continue the development of Web-based Intelligent Symbology Extraction based on Context (WISEC), a unique enterprise symbology system that integrates state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools with our syntactic event attribute extraction and contextual event coreference algo ...