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 ...

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 ...

In previous research and development, the developers created VidCode, a platform for students in grades 4 to 12 to learn computer science skills by using digital media assets (e.g., photos, audio, graphics) to create special effects in videos while learning about the code responsible for the action. In this project, the developers will create a prototype dashboard to provide teachers tools to mana ...

In this project, the team will develop a prototype of a web-based coding progression tool for high school students to practice coding from easy to successively harder levels. The prototype will provide graded practice exercises, solutions, and explanations for important coding tasks. At the end of Phase I, in a pilot study in five high school classrooms, the researchers will examine whether the pr ...

Aret Associates and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) propose an interdisciplinary effort to further develop and validate a robust, operational biomonitoring application that can process soil microbiome data to reliably detect episodic and low-level chronic contamination while maintaining low false alarm rate.The Phase II SBIR work will build upon the successful Phase I proof-of-concept demonst ...

Deep Learning for standoff detection of Special Nuclear Material (DLeN) applies the same deep learning techniques that allow computers to beat human performance in image recognition and the game of Go to detecting Special Nuclear Material. Spectral analysis and signal processing can in some cases be augmented by the use of much larger neural nets that conduct much deeper analysis of features of th ...

Echo Ridge proposes to deliver a Hardware-in-the-Loop RF environment emulator with high fidelity scintillation simulation within which propagation models will in real-time accurately simulate a nuclear-disturbed environment for testing MILSATCOM communications links. The emulator will accommodate the attachment of physical devices (MILSATCOM communications link equipment or simulators), and/or mod ...

The BASALT (Biosecurity Assessment using Semantic Analysis of Life sciences Text) system accelerates the process of DURC (Dual Use Research of Concern) review by automatically the detecting of concepts of concern in research proposals. Concepts of concern are statements expressed as phrases, sentences, or even whole paragraphs, that evoke ideas related to the 15 pathogens and 7 experimental catego ...

Next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) hardware, such as the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Many-Integrated-Core processor, provide new deep memory architectures that offer the promise of increased performance. The challenge in taking full advantage of this architecture is selecting which data structures will be placed in the high-bandwidth memory. Optimizing data structure placement in ...

The SBIR Phase I effort will demonstrate the performance of an Atmospheric Pressure Glow Discharge (APGD) excitation/ionization source with Laser Ablation (LA) sampling and Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) for rapid field elemental and isotopic analysis of surrogate nuclear debris samples. Laser sampling mitigates the need for sample preparation or consumables. The APGD will be tested as an ato ...