Award Data

Most of today's precision guided weapons use Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to gain improved accuracy. But, as Operation Iraqi Freedom recently showed, foreign militaries have equipment to locally jam GPS signals. Another effective method ofautonomous navigation is necessary to ensure mission success. Similar to rudimentary terrain recognition used in early cruise missiles, the matching o ...

Future IRCM laser transmitters are being developed based on optically pumped GaSb mid-infrared semiconductor laser, however, the current technology requires the laser to be operated at cryogenic temperature. Aculight and MIT Lincoln Laboratory propose toinvestigate methods to increase the operating temperature of these semiconductor lasers, which will dramatically decrease the cost of the laser t ...

Advanced Acoustic Concepts, Inc. (AAC) proposes to implement a computational model of human auditory processing based upon cortical theory and to demonstrate its utility to evaluate and improve systems for speech communication and automated recognition ofspectro-temporal patterns. Specifically, AAC believes that unusual brain representations and processing strategies are largely responsible for th ...

Composites that are reinforced with well-dispersed carbon nanotubes have been shown to improve the performance of polymers in many areas such as stiffness, heat distortion temperature, control of thermal coefficient of expansion, and corrosion resistancein extreme environments. However, much of the nanocomposite related research and development has not been directly relevant to carbon fiber reinfo ...

Crested multi-layer tunnel barriers have been proposed, which offer a revolutionary solution to overcome density to speed trade-offs characteristic of present data storage technologies. Practical implementation of the proposed technology will involve useof thin film materials that are readily manufacturable and CMOS-compatible. A critical need exists for experimental verification of the theoreti ...

Human ability to attend to a single voice in the presence of background interference is remarkable. If this could be imitated in practical technology it would be of great benefit for automatic speech recognition and other applications. Researchers at OhioState University have demonstrated computational methods for separating speech from interfering sounds that imitate human auditory processing, an ...

Micromachined deformable mirrors are being commercialized by the contractor and applied to DOD related projects due to their light weight, fast response, small size, and inexpensive fabrication costs. During Phase II, the contractor and university teamwill demonstrate a novel projection system incorporating a micromachined deformable mirror, and develop a complete adaptive optics system based upo ...

This program addresses a new approach to IR imager that closely mimics biological organisms sense principals, having advantages in sensitivity, energy efficiency, reliability, and cost as compared with the competitive approaches. The innovation is based onincorporation of sensitive polymer-molecular with a highly efficient micro-machined thermal-mechanical PFA that directly converts IR image into ...

The effects of poor usability range from mere inconvenience to disaster. Human factors specialists employ usability analysis to reduce the likelihood or impact of such failures. However, good usability analysis requires usability reports that are rarelycollected, rarely complete, and difficult to analyze.Aptima and the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (U. Mass. Amherst) have partnered ...

This proposal proposes the synergistic integration of several methods for mining images, detecting, correlating and evaluating the existence of artifacts due to either hidden information or changes or target patterns or noise. The first method is based onthe Pixels Flow Functions (PFF) able to detect changes in images by projecting the pixel values vertically, horizontally and diagonally. These pr ...