Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) Receives DARPA XDATA contract to research new Machine Learning & Big Data Technologies

[Dateline]—SSCI, a leading developer and provider of Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics, AI & Intelligent Autonomy technologies, today announced receiving research funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new and advanced Machine Learning software based on Automated Bayesian Cross-Categorization (ABC) family of algorithms for heterogeneous structured and unstructured databases.  This contract is part of DARPA’s XDATA program, a 4-year research effort to develop new computational techniques and open source software tools for processing and analyzing data, motivated by defense needs.  SSCI has been selected by DARPA as a performer in the technical area of scalable analytics and data processing technology.  The contract is administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, NY.

Dr. Raman K. Mehra, CEO of SSCI remarked, “We are very excited and proud to be part of the DARPA’s XDATA program and look forward to collaborating with other awardees and developing open-source software for advanced Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics and Predictive Statistical Inference”.

SSCI’s team consists of senior researchers from MIT, U. of Louisville, and Prior Knowledge Inc.

Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) pioneers products and technologies that provide the intelligence for unmanned ground, air and maritime vehicles to autonomously and collaboratively accomplish missions in difficult environments.  Our technologies are currently at work in the Tomahawk Cruise Missile Program and numerous other U.S. Department of Defense systems.

For more information on DARPA and the XDATA program, visit www.darpa.mil.

Small technology businesses, such as Scientific Systems Company, Inc., could receive up to $2.6 billion more in research funding through two federal programs during the next six fiscal years.

Scientific Systems Company, of Woburn, Massachusetts, is one of the nation’s top recipients of SBIR contracts, according to its website.  The company announced Dec. 8 that it received a $1 million SBIR award to develop technology that reconstructs radar images for intelligence agency use.  Its partners on the project include Raytheon Missile Systems and Boston University.”

Dr. Raman K. Mehra, CEO of SSCI remarked:  “It is a great honor for SSCI to be selected by Bloomberg Government News for its article on the SBIR program out of over 6000 small high tech businesses that participate in this great program which has now been reauthorized by Congress for additional 6 years.”

 Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the Missile Defense Agency to continue development of their Unified Interceptor Assignment Algorithms for pairing incoming missiles with the most capable interception platform.  The algorithms were previously demonstrated in simulation under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program.  This contract continues SSCI’s industry-leading work in using the Unified Bayesian methodology to intelligently optimize resource management in a variety of applications ranging from sensor networks to robotic vehicles or missile defense.

 The two-year contract is valued at approximately $1 M.  SSCI is supported in this project by the Mission Systems & Sensor (MS2) division of Lockheed Martin. 

 Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to continue development of their VERIFY system for sensor evaluation and integrity monitoring, previously demonstrated under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program. VERIFY monitors a sensor’s measurements and compares against other system data to evaluate trustworthiness of the measurements, which is especially valuable when SWaP constraints are prohibitive of full sensor redundancy.  This system will be used by manned and unmanned aircraft to detect anomalous readings in sensor data (primarily radar) which would indicate that the sensor is out of calibration or in need of maintenance. Because the VERIFY system can alert analysts, mission planners, and flight crews to the problem before the sensor fails—and when possible will mitigate the failure to continue obtaining usable data—VERIFY reduces the requirement for redundancy in sensors and missions to ensure that the needed information is obtained.

 “This project builds on SSCI’s long history of work in the prognostics and health monitoring field,” said Mr. Joe Jackson, principal engineer on the Phase II project.  “By reducing the need for spares and preemptive or reactive maintenance to produce confidence in the instruments’ performance, this project will produce a cost savings for the Air Force and help the warfighter collect actionable intelligence under adverse circumstances.”

 The two-year contract is valued at approximately $750,000.  SSCI is supported in this project by the Brigham Young University.

 Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Army, Aberdeen Proving Ground, to continue development of their Finite-field Algebra for Unbeatable Situational-awareness in Tactical networks (FAUST), previously demonstrated under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program.  The FAUST algorithms provide scalability and survivability for tactical networks connecting vehicles, robots, and soldiers, while efficiently synchronizing Situational Awareness information among all nodes.  This award extends SSCI’s ongoing work in a variety of specialized ad hoc networking techniques intended for airborne, man-portable, and unmanned vehicle networks.

 “The The value of FAUST is that it can quickly update large amounts of information across all nodes in the network, even if the network connectivity is intermittent,” said Mr. Carlos Gutierrez, lead engineer for the FAUST project.  By passing a description of the information rather than the information itself, FAUST reduces synch times by an order of magnitude compared to current algorithms.  “This has great applicability to wifi and cellular networks, where a large number of users could create a bottleneck in synchronization,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

 The two-year contract is valued at approximately $750,000, including options.  SSCI is supported in this project by Boston University. 

Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Army Computers and Electronics Research Development and Engineering Command (CERDEC), Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, to continue development of their PNAV system for quantifying human motion for improved navigation in the absence of GPS.  The PNAV system uses low-cost accelerometers like those found in a smart phone to accurately determine whether a person is walking, crawling, jumping, climbing, ascending or descending stairs, or performing other actions.  The system uses GPS when available to learn an individual Soldier’s motion characteristics and feeds this information into the Army’s next-generation navigation system to locate a Soldier indoors or in tunnels or caves.

The two-year contract is valued at approximately $750,000.  SSCI is supported in this project by the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Honeywell Corporation. 

 Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to continue development of their Distributed Battle Data Network (DBDN) system, previously demonstrated under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program.  This system will be used by manned and unmanned aircraft and ground stations to detect and avoid enemy air defenses through innovative information sharing between all networked assets.  DBDN provides routing that automatically generates multi-path routes when they are needed to keep track of more network state information so routes will minimize exposure to enemy interference, and Disruption Tolerant Networking techniques to avoid data loss during short outages and increase detection information delivery. DBDN also provides network organization techniques to optimize detection information delivery to fusion nodes that can combine them to detect enemy emitters and methods for fast detection of congestion or link loss to trigger re-routing.

The two-year contract is valued at approximately $750,000.  SSCI is supported in this project by the BBN Technologies division of Raytheon.

Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center, San Diego, CA, to continue development of their Cross-Layer Cache and Queue Management for Resilient Tactical Networks (CLCQMRTN, pronounced CLICK-martin), previously demonstrated under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program.  The CLCQMRTN system allows efficient delay-tolerant communication between secured and unsecured networks on the Navy’s next-generation Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS).  This award extends SSCI’s ongoing work in a variety of specialized ad hoc networking techniques intended for airborne, man-portable, and unmanned vehicle networks.

The two-year contract is valued at approximately $1 million, including options.  SSCI is supported in this project by the BBN Technologies division of Raytheon.

 Scientific Systems Company announces that it has been awarded a contract by the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to continue development of their Interrupted Synthetic Aperature Radar Reconstruction algorithms, previously demonstrated under a Phase I Small Business Innovation and Research Program.  The intSAR algorithm performs reconstruction of SAR images which contain gaps or interference, allowing image analysts to gain actionable intelligence from data that would otherwise be considered unusable.

 “This is a revolutionary approach to the gapping problem,” said Dr. Les Novak of SSCI.  “This technique has never been applied to SAR data before, but in Phase I, we were seeing results that were comparable to ungapped data.”  The plan for this Phase II SBIR program includes development of a faster, real-time version of the intSAR algorithm which may be embedded on a radar system.

 The two-year contract is valued at approximately $1 million.  SSCI is supported in this project by Boston University and Raytheon Missile Systems.

WOBURN, MA, Oct. 29, 2009 – Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI), a leading developer of technology solutions for defense and industrial suppliers, today announced the Department of Homeland Security selected them for a contract award to develop technology for unattended ground sensors (UGS) that will help U.S. Customs and Border control agents automatically distinguish humans from animals at national border crossings. The Small Business Investment Research (SBIR) contract leverages SSCI’s leadership in technology enabling intelligent autonomous land-based and aerial unmanned systems to perform their missions in hostile or challenging environments.

Working with a subcontractor, Crane Wireless Solutions, SSCI will develop signal processing and data processing algorithms enabling UGS systems to discriminate human from animal activity through a multi-modal detect-and-classify sensor network that integrates acoustic, seismic, thermal and electro-optical imaging.

“SSCI’s robust technology platform is an excellent foundation for a system that will reduce false alarms generated by current-generation UGS systems, which often fail to differentiate between animals foraging for food and human beings crossing the border,” said Dr. Raman Mehra, Founder & CEO of SSCI. “A reduction in the false alarm rate will dramatically reduce the workload of Customs and Border Patrol agents, who must personally investigate alarms.”

The contract award is for Phase I of the SBIR contract, for multiple algorithms that will work with the multi-modal sensors. Phases II and III will deliver commercially available applications. Mehra said the award is “yet another example of SSCI’s leadership in providing the brains and nervous systems for unmanned systems to operate autonomously in remote and hostile environments and accomplish their missions flawlessly.”

SSCI is one of the nation’s top recipients of SBIR contracts. SBIR contracts are designed to stimulate technological innovation and promote the productivity and economic growth of the nation by engaging private enterprise in productive innovation projects for the U.S. government.

About Scientific Systems Company, Inc.
Scientific Systems Company, Inc. (SSCI) pioneers products and technologies that provide the intelligence for unmanned ground, air and maritime vehicles to autonomously and collaboratively accomplish missions in difficult environments. A leading developer of technology solutions for defense and industrial suppliers, SSCI is one of the top 20 recipients of Small Business Innovation Research awards in the U.S. and is recognized by the U.S. Navy and Army for its record of successful technology transitions. A privately held company based in Massachusetts, SSCI collaborates with a network of defense industry prime contractors and consultants, drawing on an accumulated investment of over $150 million in advanced research and development funding.

Contact:
Greg Moeller
(781) 933-5355 x295
gmoeller@ssci.com