Award Data

NOAA can reduce costs and improve efficiency by remotely monitoring harbors, navigation channels and coastlines for bathymetric changes. This will aid NOAA and its mission to maintain waterways and assure maritime safety. This remote sensing can be accomplished by implementing a new radar derived bathymetry capability. Areté Associated proposes to implement an advanced algorithm to derive bath ...

Existing information extraction technology can only partially address the problem of exploiting unreadably-large amounts text. When discussion of events is limited to simple, past-tense, factual descriptions of events, current NLP-based systems can ident

In order to better protect critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, perimeter and passive defenses must be complemented with an active defense mechanism which elevates the risks, or costs, a potential attacker will face. The effectiveness of an active defense mechanism, however, is ultimately limited by its ability to detect threats fast, accurately, and reliably. For this Phase II project, we ...

To hijack the execution of a program, an attacker must overwrite the value of a return address or a function pointer (broadly defined). To prevent program hijacking, our product will provide a layered defense of these two targets, including deterministic and randomization defenses, with the ability in many cases to continue execution after a hijacking attempt is prevented. Our product toolkit incl ...

Deployment of unmanned systems continues to expand across a wide range of missions; for example, logistics and resupply missions, force application and protection, and improving battlespace awareness. Presently these unmanned systems run at the lowest of four possible levels of autonomy, that is, in a teleoperated mode, and each system typically requires multiple operators. To address this proble ...

Buoy vandalism occurs all over the world for many different reasons, and costs NOAA and other buoy operators an estimated $1 million annually to replace and repair them. To deter vandals and report any vandal attempts to NOAA, McQ has developed the Buoy Guard System (BGS). BGS is a small, extremely low power sensor system that will detect the presence of intruders first approaching and then boa ...

The trend toward replacement of highly toxic chemicals with less hazardous alternatives has created the demand for replacement of chromate conversion coatings for corrosion protection of aluminum alloys. Aluminum alloys are the predominate structural material used in aircraft because of their high strength-to-weight ratios, affordability and processability. Aluminum is subject to catastrophic fail ...

This SBIR program would develop practical methods for the interconnection, addressing and control of large numbers of distributed MEMS-based sensing and actuation elements using optical fiber multiplexing techniques. Such interconnected sensor/actuator arrays have immediate and long-term applications in the instrumentation and control of adaptive aircraft, spacecraft and hydrocraft structures, fl ...

The purpose of the VMIS is to allow manufacturers the luxury of testing and perfecting manufacturing plans long before a single machine tool is turned on and resources are committed. The VMIS will allow the user to select an available machine tool and an available inspection device, specify a proposed inspection plan and a dimensional analysis procedure, and then build and inspect hundreds (or ev ...

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS EMPLOYING OBJECT-ORIENTED DATA MODELS HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE FEASIBILITY OF REPRESENTING COMPLEX AND ABSTRACT CARTOGRAPHIC FEATURES AS COMPOSITES OF SIMPLER FEATURES. SEPARATE DEVELOPMENTS IN NEURAL-NETWORK TECHNOLOGY HAVE SHOWN PROMISE IN RECOGNIZING OR EXTRACTING SPATIAL FEATURES WITHIN SAMPLE DATA SETS. COMBINING OBJECT-ORIENTED AND NEURAL-NETWORKS APPROACHES MAY LEAD TO NEW ...