Air force 12. 1 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions
Download 1.41 Mb.
|
| DESCRIPTION: During military operations, there is a need to make quick decisions to uphold a tactical advantage, maintain safety, and accomplish mission directives. Nowhere is this more pressing than in cyber operations where operators need to assimilate large amounts of information and make decisions where the subsequent consequences may not be fully understood. These decisions can be based on complex and dynamic information sources for which uncertainty exists about the quality of data presented. It is these types of situations that knowledge is needed about what data to trust (Wang and Emurian, 2005) because of the ability of perceived trustworthiness to act as a strong cue that influences the quality of decision-making (Van’t Wout & Sanfey, 2008). Unfortunately, decision makers are presented with information in such a way that this vital information is rarely portrayed. Similarly, decision-aiding systems can provide recommendations about a course of action to take, but more sophisticated aids are aware of their confidence in their recommendations and need to convey this to the human operator as well.
Strategies and interface tools are needed that provide effective conveyance of trustworthiness information in order to build accurate and reliable human + machine trust and behavior (Hoffman et. al., 2009). Simply conveying the machine’s confidence level or perception of information certainty and trustworthiness may be neither the most efficient nor the most effective means of obtaining accurate trust and improved performance from the human and machine team, regardless of the innovativeness of the user interface. Instead, recent research on the creation (and destruction) of trust in machine systems must be taken into account to close the loop—and thereby provide an adaptive system which takes into account the human’s potential over or mistrust response in how it conveys recommendations (Bisantz & Seong, 2001). Trust is a complex concept that can be influenced by many different factors, thus requiring a multifaceted approach (Oleson, Billings, Kocsis, Chen & Hancock, 2011). The addition of trustworthiness information will clarify the relevance and limitations of information used to support a decision by diminishing cases where action is based on incomplete or uncertain information, and suggesting ways to improve the provision of data to support the decision. PHASE I: Provide design and demonstration of the methods, strategies, or tools for adapting a presentation to yield effective and calibrated trust. May include application and scenario development to support the identification and metrics for assessing trust. Methods for assessing the benefit of information trust levels should be documented, including measures of effectiveness and measures of performance. PHASE II: Develop and demonstrate a prototype system based on the preliminary design from Phase I. All appropriate testing will be performed along with a critical review to finalize the design. Evaluate trust, workload and usage decision impacts in experimental trials with reasonable face validity. PHASE III DUAL USE COMMERCIALIZATION: Military Application: Military applications of this technology range from high tempo and criticality situations such as command and control and weapons release to situations of comparatively reduced criticality such as intelligence interpretation and cyber security. Commercial Application: Commercial applications can be as critical (commercial aviation, industrial processing, energy generation and transport) as well as more ubiquitous (e.g., deciding whether a given email is a phishing attempt or not).
1. Bisantz, A. M. and Seong. Y. (2001). Assessment of operator trust in and utilization of automated decision aids under different framing conditions. International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 28,2,85-97. 2. Hoffman, R.R., Lee, J.D. Woods, D.D., Shadbolt, N., Miller, J., & Bradshaw, J.M. (Nov.-Dec. 2009) The Dynamics of Trust in Cyberdomains. Intelligent Systems. IEEE 24(6) pp.5-11. 3. Oleson, K.E. Billings, D.R. Kocsis, V. Chen, J.Y.C. & Hancock, P.A. (February 2011) Antecedents of trust in human-robot collaborations. Proceedings of the First International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support (CogSIMA). IEEE pp.175-178, 22-24. 4. Wang, Y. D. and Emurian, H. H.. An overview of online trust: Concepts, elements, and implications. Computers in Human Behavior, 21, 105-125. 5. Van't Wout, M. and Sanfey, A. G. (2008). Friend or foe: The effect of implicit trustworthiness judgments in social decision-making. Cognition, 2005, pp. 108, 796-803. KEYWORDS: trust,decisionmaking,human-machinecollaboration AF121-032 TITLE: Efficient Computational Tool for RF-Induced Thermal Response TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Biomedical OBJECTIVE: Develop a fast approach for predicting whole-body and localized thermal response of tissue due to RF exposures. DESCRIPTION: Electromagnetic devices are used increasingly in society, with applications in communication, medicine, security, and defense, among other disciplines and technology areas. This has led to a great deal of research regarding the safety and potential health hazards of such devices. To aid in this study, sophisticated computational electromagnetic software tools have been created. These tools have been crucial to the development of international safety standards, and for compliance testing of new technologies with respect to these standards. For radio frequency (RF) exposures, the standard is typically a limitation on the specific absorption rate (SAR) in units of watts per kilogram. Alternatively, electromagnetic power density limits may be used for simplicity. The rationale behind SAR-based exposure limits is to minimize the risk of thermally induced adverse biological effects. To further study RF-induced thermal effects, researchers have recently developed modeling tools capable of predicting temperature effects in realistic digital human models. These tools are useful for high-fidelity and high-resolution analysis of core-body and localized temperatures during RF exposure. These simulations, however, can be very computationally expensive and are generally useful for only a small subset of possible exposure conditions. Specifically, high fidelity voxel models may be used to predict the temperature evolution within the body while accounting for non-uniform SAR distributions. To fully capture SAR "hotspots" and therefore maximum local temperatures, a voxel resolution of 2 mm or finer is often required, resulting in simulation runtimes of up to several hours for many cases. Therefore, predicting the range of potential thermal outcomes due to thermoregulatory variability across a population of people may be time prohibitive. To mitigate the computational burden of whole body thermal simulations, several approaches may be taken. These approaches can be broadly categorized into two primary methods: 1) Hardware acceleration techniques (such as GPGPU) may be used to create very high throughput thermal models and 2) heuristic or analytical approximation techniques may be used to estimate temperatures across a range of possible exposure/environmental conditions and human thermal capacities. A combination of these two approaches may also be considered. For example, computational models may be used to determine semi-analytical temperature response curves, and Monte Carlo-type simulations may then be used to predict the range of possible thermal outcomes. The ideal solution should be able to simulate the evolution of temperature within digital human anatomical models at 2mm or finer resolution. For hardware accelerated techniques, such as porting computation to a Graphics Processing Unit, simulation speed should be on the order of 100x faster than comparable CPU simulations. Runtimes to simulate a one minute long RF exposure would therefore be on the order of seconds up to a few minutes. Analytical or semi-analytical techniques should seek to provide temperature predictions across a range of individuals or exposures in near real-time, i.e. a few seconds or less. Biomedical scientists, health and medical physicists, and bioenvironmental engineers would all benefit from software that enabled efficient thermal simulations for RF exposures. PHASE I: Determine the computational methods to be used, and develop prototype software that illustrates the effectiveness of the chosen method. The prototype software should illustrate the ability to predict both whole body and localized temperatures over time. Simulation runtime and model fidelity will be the metrics of success. PHASE II: Extend the software created in Phase I to allow for a broad range of exposures. The software output should include both whole body and tissue specific thermal response. A user interface should be included for creating simulations and viewing results. Also during Phase II, the software should be fully developed and optimized with respect to computational runtime. Finally, a validation of the developed software should be performed against empirical data. PHASE III DUAL USE COMMERCIALIZATION: Military Application: Use by engineers and health physicists to study risks of accidental RF overexposure. Used by Air Force to predict potential of overexposure during engagement of novel directed energy systems. Commercial Application: Use by engineers and health physicists to study risks of accidental RF overexposure. Use in hyperthermia treatment applications. Use in human thermal comfort research.
1. Electromagnetic and heat transfer computations for non-ionizing radiation dosimetry. Physics in Medicine and Biology 2000 Vol. 45 2. A Formula for Simply Estimating Body Core Temperature Rise in Humans Due to Microwave Exposures 2009 Proceedings of IEICE 3. FDTD analysis of body-core temperature elevation in children and adults for whole-body exposure. Physics in Medicine and Biology 2008 Vol. 53 KEYWORDS: computational modeling and simulation, radio frequency, thermal modeling, GPU, Graphics Processing Unit AF121-033 TITLE: Discourse Analysis for Insights into Group Identity and Intent TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Human Systems OBJECTIVE: Develop techniques for improved extraction and interpretation of discourse related to social identity, social categorization, and moral disengagement. DESCRIPTION: Discourse provides a window into the proverbial heads of an individual and a group, reflecting how they view themselves and how they view the world. As part of an integrated methodology to fully assess and exploit our understanding of the patterns of life, discourse provides a mechanism to identify leading indicators of hostility, and this, in turn, would provide a powerful mechanism to cue, collect and interpret other direct and indirect sensor data. For example, through discourse, individuals will provide signals related to the various mechanisms related to moral disengagement (e.g., use of language and images which dehumanize them).1 Discourse provides the understanding of values, attitudes and group norms (all key elements of how group social identity is constructed)2 critical for reasoning about current and likely future behaviors and ultimately group intent. Without this understanding, analysts will always be reactive versus proactive. While many people are focused on sentiment analysis (largely through an aggregated analysis of good and bad words as identified by Subject Matter Experts) as sufficient to assess mood or attitudes, this does not focus on group identity and thus does not provide the necessary information to reason about intent. However, previous efforts by both DARPA (under the “Automated Sentiment Analysis” seedling effort) and previous AFRL efforts: Analysis of Discourse and Discursive Practices for Indications and Warnings 3 and Taliban Pashto Discourse Analysis have resulted in some foundational capabilities in terms of automated approaches for extraction of sentiment based on the context of who is speaking about whom/what and methodologies for extracting and interpreting in-group/out-group discourse and assessing integrative complexity4,5 (integrative complexity can be used to assess the likelihood of conflict/hostility as well as cooperation, so applicability is throughout the spectrum of conflict). The former is semi-automated, but does not focus on group identity and intent while the latter provide techniques for both exploiting information related to group identity and inferring intent (integrative complexity). Proposals are sought for innovative mixed initiative techniques (methodology and semi-automated processing) to combine the ability to extract information related to group identity, attitudes with the ability to support reasoning about group intent. Proposals may focus on improving techniques in semi-automated processing (text analytics) individually; however, novel ideas that would lead to the development of a mixed initiative (human/computer) with both semi-automated processing of discourse and improved methodologies for interpretation, inference and analysis is not only encouraged, but desired. Note that this topic is in the key technology areas of human systems (system interfaces and cognitive processing) and information systems technology (knowledge and information management) with the human systems technology area being primary. The evaluation should evaluate both the semi-automated processing, but the ability to support improved analysis. The mechanism to do that will be to have a comparative analysis of the processed output, a manually coded output for analysis with and without the integrative complexity scoring method. Due to the short time period of Phase I, it is preferable that currently available databases be used in the evaluation. PHASE I: Identify discursive mechanisms, techniques for extracting information about group identity, and indicators of moral disengagement. Develop innovative techniques for group identity centric text analytics and evaluate their performance for a single language and a single domain. PHASE II: PHASE II: Further develop the proposed techniques and evaluate their performance for multiple languages and/or domains/groups to show the generality of the techniques. The evaluations should follow the same format as described under the Phase I description but for the new languages and domains. Any databases collected for development and/or evaluation should be delivered to the contract sponsor. PHASE III DUAL USE COMMERCIALIZATION: Military Application: Military applications include, Anticipatory ISR (e.g, Indications and Warnings (I&W), COA analysis for Effects Based Approach to Operations, Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations (i.e., conflict resolution, negotiations). Commercial Application: Commercial applications are similar to military applications but generally for different domains, such as: law enforcement, business (negotiations).
1. Bandura, A. “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” in Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3:3, pp.193-209, 1999. 2. Tajfel, H., and Turner, J.C. The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior. In S. Worchel & W. Austin (eds), Psychology of Intergroup Relations, Chicago: Nelson-Hall (pp. 7-24). 3. Toman, P., Kuznar, L., Baker, T. and Hartman, A. “Analysis of Discourse Accent and Discursive Practices I&W”, AFRL-RH-WP-TR-2010-7580, September 2010. 4. Suedfeld, P., Guttieri, K., & Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Assessing integrative complexity at a distance: Archival analyses of thinking and decision making (pp. 246-272). KEYWORDS: social identity, moral disengagement, social categorization, text analytics, discourse analysis, sentiment analysis AF121-036 TITLE: Ultra-Fast Transfer Techniques to Download Data TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems Technology related to this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) (DFARS 252.204-7009). As such, export-controlled data restrictions apply. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign citizens, including country of origin, type of visa/work permit held, and the Statement of Work (SOW) tasks to be performed. In addition, this acquisition involves technology with military or space application. Therefore, only U.S. contractors registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Services Center (DLSC), Federal Center, Battle Creek MI 49017-3084, (800) 352-3572, are eligible for award. If selected, the firm must submit a copy of an approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement. OBJECTIVE: Develop technology for high speed transfer of data from solid state storage media to a secondary storage media. DESCRIPTION: Numerous data acquisition systems are generating more and more data every year. This growth is exponential with both the greater bandwidth and acquisition speed of the devices increasing combined with greater numbers of these devices available for installation. Typical data rates are approaching 9Gigabytes per second. Large solid state disk (SSD) arrays are utilized to store this data. After a period of data acquisition, it is necessary to download the data for analysis. Presently, flash-memory-based SSDs are available with data transfer rates of 768 Megabyte per second interface data transfer rate. This results in a ratio of approximately 1.4 hours required for download of the original 1 hour data collection period accumulated data. There is a significant lag in data availability when accessing data collected by persistent acquisition system. In addition to the time lag, there is, with present practice of physically removing the SSDs from the acquisition system and installing into data extraction system there is a limited number of install/remove cycles possible. This is a material issue resulting from the handling involved. This SBIR seeks to develop a novel approach, architecture, and design for transferring large quantities of collected data from the data acquisition system storage-area to post-processing storage-area and onto a network server at half the time it took to acquire and store the data within the acquisition system. Approaches may include, but are not limited to hybrid realtime and offline data downloading approaches, highly-parallel offline data transfer systems using novel hardware and software optimizations. A limiting factor is that in some instances, the realtime data extraction and transmission is necessarily of secondary priority to delivery of data to an end-user, i.e. may not be optimal data transfer rate at all times.Equally acceptable would be development of a new sustained high-speed read/write SSD chip architecture allowing increased interface data transfer rate. PHASE I: Develop a novel approach with sufficient architecture and design detail (to include detailed analysis) to show approach feasibility. PHASE II: Develop a detailed design and prototype of the hardware/software/algorithm constituting the approach and architecture and demonstrate its effectiveness in downloading imagery data to a storage facility and network server. PHASE III DUAL USE COMMERCIALIZATION: Military Application: Near real time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance exploitation across multiple sensor domains; possible new anti-tamper implementation. Commercial Application: Faster large volume movie copying, improved computer data storage and access systems, improved high performance data access layers and retrieval.
1. Balakrishnan, M., Kadav, A., Prabhakaran, V., and Malkhi, D. 2010. Differential RAID: Rethinking RAID for SSD Reliability. ACM Trans. Storage 6, 2, Article 4 (July 2010), 22 pages. DOI = 10.1145/1807060.1807061 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1807060.1807061. 2. F. Chen, D. A. Koufaty, and X. Zhang, “Understanding intrinsic characteristics and system implications of flash memory based solid state drives,” in ACM SIGMETRICS, Seattle, WA, Jun. 2009. 3. http://storageconference.org/2011/Papers/Research/2.Huang.pdf (paper title: Performance Modeling and Analysis of Flash-based Storage Devices). KEYWORDS: high speed data transfer, data transfer parallelization, high performance data access layers AF121-037 TITLE: Next Generation Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (MANET) for Aircraft TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Air Platform, Information Systems Technology related to this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) (DFARS 252.204-7009). As such, export-controlled data restrictions apply. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign citizens, including country of origin, type of visa/work permit held, and the Statement of Work (SOW) tasks to be performed. In addition, this acquisition involves technology with military or space application. Therefore, only U.S. contractors registered and certified with the Defense Logistics Services Center (DLSC), Federal Center, Battle Creek MI 49017-3084, (800) 352-3572, are eligible for award. If selected, the firm must submit a copy of an approved DD Form 2345, Militarily Critical Technical Data Agreement. OBJECTIVE: Development of next generation Mobile ad-hoc Networks (MANET) for airborne nodes in complex operating environments. DESCRIPTION: Current military operating forces consist of a complex mesh of next generation unmanned aircraft, rapidly deployable advance strike and stealth capabilities, ballistic missiles and legacy aircraft systems. Combined with complex operating environments consisting of contested Radio Frequency (RF) communications and cyber intrusions, these situations are difficult to pre-plan from an RF mission preparation perspective and even more difficult to implement as intended. Users may be left to fend for themselves as static operating channels are lost to signal interference and protocols are non-existent for routing of mission-critical information back to the Global Information Grid (GIG). Next generation airborne networking protocols and network management tools are needed to reduce the network overhead and pre-planning necessary for these complex missions while ensuring the reliability and bandwidth affordability necessary for modern military networks. A solution is needed which implements the MANET construct while minimizing network overhead for small to medium sized operational networks (10-100 participants). Such a protocol should consider memory and processing limitations of legacy aircraft while addressing needs of next generation wireless communications systems. Such a network, in addition to being robust to interference, jamming and other complex operating environments, should also exhibit Low Probability of Detection / Low Probability of Interception (LPD/LPI). Such considerations may include dynamic power adaptation, multi-hop routing, spread spectrum, Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) or other means which may be included in the MANET development. Each user’s seamless entry and exit of the self-configuring multi-hop network must also be considered, including network management in a constantly changing topography. This solution should support a DoD/USAF requirement for a networking waveform to allow connection of a large number of mobile/airborne platforms to the GIG and each other without being limited by pre-configurations or having network management utilize a high percentage of the available bandwidth. PHASE I: Perform a technology feasibility assessment and deliver a simulation of the proposed MANET solution via OPNET, NS2, or other appropriate method. Also, develop a brief outline of a Phase II effort. PHASE II: Construct and demonstrate a MANET solution system for airborne nodes in a laboratory environment. Use hardware-in-the-loop with simulation environment and prototype system to demonstrate scalability of solution. PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: Military Application: Adapt the MANET solution to an airborne prototype with complete operational compatibility to validate performance characteristics of the developed system. Directory: osbp -> sbir -> solicitations -> sbir20121 solicitations -> Navy sbir fy09. 1 Proposal submission instructions solicitations -> Army 16. 3 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions sbir20121 -> Air force 12. 1 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions solicitations -> Army 14. 1 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions solicitations -> Navy small business innovation research program submitting Proposals on Navy Topics solicitations -> Navy small business innovation research program solicitations -> Armament research, development and engineering center solicitations -> Army 17. 1 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions solicitations -> Navy 11. 3 Small Business Innovation Research (sbir) Proposal Submission Instructions Download 1.41 Mb. Share with your friends:
|