Award Data

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 Large N ASW problem can be summarized as pervasive short-range sensors with limited communication capabilities. The driving questions are how are false alarms controlled-not necessarily from an individual sensor node, but from the overallfield-performance of individual sensor nodes, the amount of information and frequency of communication. From its inception, distributed detection has produc ...

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 ...

A sensor has data to send to a human observer. In the present case the sensor is a camera, and the data consists of an image. When commanded to do so, the image is heavily compressed, passed to the modem, and sent by robust, low data rate acommsgateway, then to the observer. The sensor system retains the uncompressed image in a file. If the observer finds the (compressed/decompressed) image to ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall aim of this STTR proposal is to take an innovative, successful; laboratory based technology and transfer it to the commercial sector. Specifically, we wish to establish the capabilities within the Company to manufacture reliable, robust and inexpensive ultra-micro oxygen sensors suitable for electrochemical applications related to cellular metabolis ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common neuropsychiatric condition characterized by hyperactivity, inattention and impulsivity, typically in school-aged boys. Psychostimulants, including methylphenidate and amphetamines, are commonly used to alleviate symptoms of ADHD. However, these medications are typically associated with undesirable sid ...

This proposal will enable the most efficient integration of NASA?s semiconductor lasers into strategic optical systems. To protect laser lifetimes and increase performance, these lasers will require isolators to protect them from back-reflections, similar to the isolators in all fiber-optic networks. This work proposes to monolithically integrate magneto-optical isolators with semiconductor platfo ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of phase I and II of this proposal is to develop microarray-based methods for high throughput profiling of proteins. This will be done in two different ways, one based on arrays of 100s of thousands of distinct peptides on 1 cm2 chips that can be used to fingerprint proteins, the other based on thousands or tens of thousands of antibodies again ...

Conventional Hall thrusters are difficult to scale to very small sizes. The proposed concept is a new type of compact plasma accelerator that addresses these scaling issues. It resembles a Hall thruster, taking advantage of the heritage of this proventechnology, but the current is driven inductively. It has the advantage of needing no cathode. While inductive coupling has been successfully dem ...

Interpretation of video imagery is the quintessential goal of computer vision. The ability to group moving pixels into regions and then associate semantic labels with those regions has long been studied by the vision community. Only recently have thecomponent technologies matured sufficiently to make this goal attainable for well-defined scenarios. We propose a system for semantic interpretation o ...