Award Data

Current cervical spine assessment methodologies are focused on subjective measures (i.e. pain reports) and range-of-motion (ROM) measures that only measure maximum head excursion and reach, but not dynamic motion. Due to report bias and existing incentive

Automated analysis of human activities and events on the ground from aerial videos is key to extracting critical situational awareness and gathering actionable intelligence. It poses multiple challenges, including dynamic backgrounds that can be confused with foreground, multiple simultaneous activities in the field of view, occurrence of unknown activities, and large data volume and velocity. The ...

Through the proposed Phase I Air Force STTR program, NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will demonstrate metal organic framework materials and electrospray fabrication methods for the manufacture of eye protection devices that are capable of controlling the amount of light transmitted through the device. The objective of this program is to 1) increase the dynamic range and speed of electronically switche ...

The computing demands of future data-intensive applications far exceed the capabilities of today’s electronics and cannot be met by isolated improvements in transistor technologies or integrated circuit (IC) architectures alone. Carbon Nanotube Field-Effect Transistors (CNFET) technology has emerged as leading candidate for energy-efficient and high-performance digital systems. Unfortunatel ...

The machine learning and artificial intelligence community has recently garnered much attention for ground breaking performance of novel neural network architectures for self-driving cars. One of the machine learning methods used in self-driving cars is semantic segmentation. In this fashion each pixel in an image is label with a class, allowing for contour-based image segmentation which is differ ...

Improved cameras and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have led to an explosion in the amount of airborne imagery and video collected by Air Force assets, but there are not enough trained personnel to analyze this imagery in real time. Thus, targets of opportunity and threats go undetected until the chance to act on them has passed. Automatic target detection could alleviate the burden on analysts and ...

Measuring the response of explosives to a variety of thermal and mechanical inputs is important to understand and ultimately predict the reaction violence of an explosive in an accident scenario. Technically, there are many challenges to overcome in observing explosives response. For instance, secondary high explosives are heterogeneous and optically opaque and often need to be confined in metal c ...

Diversified Technologies, Inc. (DTI) proposes to develop a Multiple Pulse flash X-ray source which can be used to make high resolution X-ray movies of explosive and ballistic tests. The new source will allow researchers to capitalize on recent advances in very high speed cameras which allow high resolution images with many frames. DTI will extend our world-class pulsed power capabilities to this c ...

Current continuous wave (CW) and pulse mid-wave infrared (MWIR) lasers have design and performance limitations that constrain their usability in some critical Air Force applications. There is an important need to create a new class of MWIR laser sources with less drawbacks and higher pulse energies and CW powers. The proposed work will demonstrate the technical feasibility of an innovative MWIR la ...

SSCI and ASU (Prof. Nancy Cooke) propose to develop SHADE (Shared Awareness in Denied Environments) - a comprehensive decision support tool which will facilitate smooth mission execution under information degradation and losses in mixed initiative teams (MIT) involving collaborating autonomous vehicles. In Phase I we propose to perform initial development, integration and testing of the SHADE tech ...