Award Data

Vulnerabilities in telecommunications channels are being exploited at alarming rates by malicious attackers to commit fraud, perpetrate scams, and organize data breaches. In addition to financial losses incurred by corporations and taxpayers, attacks against government agencies such as the DHS can severely compromise national security. A common element of these attacks is the attacker's ability to ...

Metronome Software proposes the research and development of a VIRTICONN, a zero-trust system for Virtualized Trusted Internet Connections (vTIC). The effort aims to overcome the limitations of traditional network security to provide authenticated users access to private resources, typically via a VPN or TIC. This older approach increases the attack surface of an internal system as each user is rep ...

OKSI will design and build a Precision Guidance Seeker (PGS) for the 81 mm munition. We will enhance and port our target acquisition and tracking algorithms to a real-time processor onboard the PGS, which will receive target-scene imagery prior to launch or while in flight and will deploy post apogee. OKSI will test the algorithms extensively with a wide range of military-relevant real-world data ...

Toyon proposes to research and develop algorithms for generalized salient change detection, and to incorporate these algorithms into software tools implemented on the cloud. Our approach leverages the two most promising methods from Phase I, both based on supervised learning. The first method is the entropy-based feature vector and corresponding neural network, which we will apply at a coarse sear ...

DHS is preserving the safety and the security of America by preventing, foiling, and defeating attacks from a variety of adversaries. The increasing threats (both in terms of numbers and in terms of abilities) must be addressed successfully while facing an austere budget environment. In order to be able to "do more with less" having a capability for optimizing the resources and the assets which ar ...

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms that improve the precision and recall of neural networks for low-shot object classification and detection. Our approach is based upon developing a descriptive multi-domain feature representation of the low-shot target as well as the surrounding context. A multi-branch neural network merges the various domains of information to perform accur ...

In previous R&D, the developers created codeSpark Academy, a game that employs a visual and block-based approach with puzzles to teach coding skills to students ages 5 to 9 years old. codeSpark Academy is in widespread use in and out of schools around the world. In this project, the developers will expand storytelling creative tools within the existing game. The pretend-play scenarios will include ...

Implement methods to improve our Phase I architecture for complex SAR imagery collected from different systems and with different collection parameters. Implement techniques to boost performance across all ground features of interest. Reduce the amount of human intervention needed for training our SAR image segmentation architecture.  SAR segmentation can be applied to a number of areas: Intellig ...

During altitude-induced hypoxia, operator cognitive and physical capacity degrades, compromising individual and team performance. Cognitive degradation is linked to falling brain energy levels, increased reliance on anaerobic energy production and lactate accumulation. Ketones are the evolutionary alternative substrate to glucose for brain metabolic requirements; previous studies demonstrated that ...

Addressing the DHS need to rapidly detect radio interference of critical radio frequency (RF) communications channels utilized by first responders, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to advance, in Phase II, the development of the Miniature Intelligent Spectral Analyzer (MISCAN) system proven feasible in Phase I. MISCAN is based on a combination of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) electroni ...