Award Data

There are currently no vaccines or therapeutics available for Marburg Virus Disease (MVD). Given the specter of weaponization and the terriblemorbidity and high mortality rate of MVD, this represents a critical threat to the operational readiness of the Warfighter. While traditionalvaccines have proven to be a huge contribution to public health, they do have some limitations especially in the cont ...

In a pandemic or exposure to weaponized Marburg virus the morbidity, mortality and social unrest that will ensue before vaccines orMilitary operating on foreign soil as well as to the population of the US Homeland. Practically all threat agents of biological origin (except forcertain non-proteinaceous toxins, typically produced by marine organisms and fungi) have their structure and vital function ...

Marburg virus (MARV) is a filamentous enveloped non-segmented negative sense RNA virus. This viruse is considered to be extremelydangerous with case fatality rates as high as 88-90%. Extensive efforts have gone towards effective vaccines for MARV prevention, however,none have been successfully established as licensed vaccines. Glycoprotein (GP) is the only surface protein of MARV. There are substa ...

Flow Pharma, Inc. is a biotechnology company in the San Francisco Bay Area developing fully synthetic cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL)stimulating peptide vaccines for Marburg virus. The FlowVax vaccine platform allows us to create dry powder formulations of biodegradablemicrospheres and TLR adjuvants incorporating class I and class II T cell epitopes. FlowVax vaccines can be designed for delivery by i ...

On this effort Toyon Research Corp. and The Pennsylvania State University are developing deep learning-based algorithms for object recognition and new class discovery in look-down infrared (IR) imagery. Our approach involves the development of a hybrid classifier that exploits both transfer learning and semi-supervised paradigms in order to maintain good generalization accuracy, especially when li ...

Signature Research, Inc. (SGR) and Michigan Technological University (MTU) propose a Phase I STTR effort to develop a learning algorithm which exploits the spatio-spectral characteristics inherent within IR imagery and motion imagery.Our archive of modelled and labeled data sets will allow our team to thoroughly capture the variable elements that will drive machine learning performance.The overall ...

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to research and develop algorithms for low-shot object detection, adapting popular techniques to address the complexities inherent in ATR for remote sensing. Traditional object detection algorithms rely on large corpora of data which may not be available for more exotic targets (such as foreign military assets), and therefore, traditional Convolutional Neural Ne ...

To address the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) need for overhead imagery analysis algorithms that provide uncertaintymeasures for object recognition and aggregation, Intellisense Systems, Inc. (ISS) proposes to develop a new Variational Object Recognition andGrouping Network (VORGNet) system. It is based on the innovation of implementing a Bayesian convolutional neural network (CNN) ...

We propose to build ARGON, the ARet Ground-to-Overhead Network. The network will ingest analyst-supplied ground-level imagery ofobjects and retrieve instances of those objects in overhead collections, providing tips back to the analysts. A proprietary method of trainingthe network, leveraging in-house capabilities, data sources, and tools, will be critical to its success. During Phase I, we will p ...

Building interpretable, composable autonomous systems requires consideration of uncertainties in the decisions and detections theygenerate. Human analysts need accurate absolute measures of probability to determine how to interpret and use the sometimes noisy resultsof machine learning systems; and composable autonomous systems need to be able to propagate uncertainties so that later reasoningsyst ...