Award Data

The dependability, persistence, and versatility of unmanned systems have made them indispensable assets in today’s warfighting. As they are tasked to fulfill new missions in unpredictable, dynamic environments, they are transitioning from remote control into the realm of autonomy. Here they perform rapid and semi-autonomous behaviors, such as re-planning and re-tasking, to accomplish mission obj ...

The proliferation of social media technologies has provided a promising new source of information for intelligence analysts. Effective use of this data could provide insight into the evolution of social networks, identification of communication patterns that lead to events of interest, and analysis of relevant socio-cultural factors and trends. However, intelligence analysts frequently have diffic ...

The proliferation of sophisticated ballistic missile systems threatens the ability of the U.S. to project military power and defend its deployed forces, its allies, and possibly even the homeland. Adversaries continue to improve their ballistic missile technologies, and are expected to incorporate multiple warheads, countermeasures, and decoys. The AEGIS systemthe sea-based component of the U.S. b ...

As the United States makes strides in developing, testing, and deploying missile defense technology, the human element remains core to the integrated, layered ballistic missile defense system (BMDS) architecture. Human operators oversee the command and control at the system, component, and element level across a vast array of networked ground-, sea-, and space-based sensors and interceptors to eff ...

ABSTRACT: A recent study by the National Research Council found that sophisticated statistical techniques are finding their way into DoD operational test design, but that current DoD practices are still substantially behind the state of the art. The study concluded this has resulted in inefficient test designs, wasted resources, and less effective acquisition decision making. US Air Force test an ...

Unmanned systems play a critical role in military operations across a wide range of missions. The DoD’s Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap identifies leader-follower tactics, swarming capabilities, sensor advancements, collision avoidance, and GPS-denied solutions as key technologies to support autonomy. Advances in these areas are needed to support coordinated multi-aircraft maneuvers and swar ...

Successful missile defense is critical to the security of the United States, its deployed forces, and its allies. Across numerous simulations, tests, and operational scenarios, the Government amasses large quantities of complex high-dimensional data describing missile defense outcomes. While Missile Defense Agency (MDA) analysts need to use this data to better understand and improve missile defens ...

We propose to design and build the Cyber Adversary Discovery Engine (CADE) for forensic cyber analysis. CADE combines expressive behavioral modeling technology with machine learning to automatically recognize adversary behaviors, goals and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). CADE can further automatically recognize changes in adversary TTPs that occur in forensic data. A key technical capab ...

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid acti ...

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 ...