Tuesday, May 5, :00am - 11:35am Morning Agenda

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1 10:00-10:05 10:05-10:15 Dawnbreaker, Inc. Julie Scuderi iglobe, Inc. Bill Horn A brief introduction to Dawnbreaker and the objective of the VSPI Series will be provided at the opening of the session. This STTR s broader/commercial impact is that it will allow researchers to learn more about the complex relationships between environmental conditions and the impact of changes over time. In addition to schools and universities, there are 600 museums dedicated to science, as well as aquariums and other public venues concerned with environmental issues; in essence, these all are involved in educating people, and they all look for effective means of portraying information about the Earth. While the sphere/flat-screen displays provide the most compelling views, adapting the methods developed in this project to laptops and tablets (owned by several hundred million people) can contribute to learning about climate for students and adults worldwide. This STTR leverages a commercial/ university partnership to develop a vehicle for education and public outreach on climate and climate change. With the increasing awareness and confusion about climate change and the severity of predicted impacts, it has become critical that we educate students at all levels to give them a real understanding of climate data and climate models. This project will provide compelling methods for educators and their students to explore deeply what the data and state of the art models tell us about climate changes, both natural and anthropogenic, as well as to illustrate climate processes with simple models that can be used for what if scenarios. 1 of 8

2 10:15-10:25 Optimal Solutions, Inc. Vijay Hanagandi This SBIR will demonstrate the feasibility of delivering a radically game-changing Big Data - based Supply Chain Analytics Platform. A complex supply chain, in consumer goods manufacturing and distribution, for example, involves data analysis and decision support in many areas. Today s tools and techniques used in supply chain analytics are too restrictive as they rely on the company s internal factors and are unable to effectively incorporate the increasing volume of readily available, external data. The quality of analytics directly impacts the product quality, cost of fulfillment, customer satisfaction, and ultimately the company s financial health. It is proposed to introduce Big Data concepts including distributed text mining, machine learning, and scalable analytics to support supply chain analytics. The proposed innovation will integrate increasingly available structured and unstructured external data to enhance supply chain decisions. This will enable companies to be more customer-focused, make better decisions, and become more profitable. The key results from this research will include algorithms and methods to pre-process inherently unstructured Big Data into quantitative and qualitative descriptors suitable to be inputs for creating new indicators for decision making. The benefits of better supply chain analytics are clear and significant including better products, better customer service, reduced waste and costs, and increased quality. 2 of 8

3 10:25-10:35 Polka Dot IO Inc. Szymon Jakubczak The broader impact/commercial potential of this SBIR is to dramatically transform the way people interact with and take information away from their physical environments. As information displays and mobile devices continue to multiply, they give access to ever increasing amounts of information. However, limited by their narrow input and output interfaces, personal devices inadvertently isolate their users from their immediate surroundings, instead focusing their attention toward the digital content in the cloud. Natural and effortless interaction could reconnect us to the physical world. Enabling seamless public-private communication has the potential to revolutionize physical display media, outdoor advertising, and public signage. It can generate new interactive experiences which are both immersive and personalized to the user bringing second screen applications beyond dedicated space, such as living room or airplane seat. Furthermore, it can shift digital content delivery from cellular networks to much more granular proximal networks. Going forward, in the advent of wearable camera-enabled devices, such technology can become the primary source of local context and intent information, relieving the user from the task of manual or vocal input. This project will develop visual tags which can be scanned from afar while remaining visually unobtrusive. This research will result in a practical system design which shifts considerable complexity from the scanner to the infrastructure. With lower complexity, the visual tags can be decoded quickly, robustly, and at distances beyond the reach of 2D barcodes. Additionally, by leveraging a novel spatio-temporal display technique, called VRCodes, the proposed visual tags are essentially imperceptible. 3 of 8

4 10:35-10:45 Skookoo LLC Jeremy Scheinberg This SBIR seeks to test the feasibility and commercialize a multimodal storytelling toy and software application to generate fundamental interest and augment learning in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) at a young age. Although there are a number of toys and educational products on the market targeted toward children at an older age, a void exists for educational toys that provide a dedicated focus on STEM education for younger children. This project will involve the development of a curriculum along with a prototype application to promote early adoption of STEM education in a classroom environment. The application will feature academically sound stories centered on scientific concepts featuring the child along with a companion character to act as their guide through the stories. The toy character and story personalization aim to create an emotional connection between the child and the STEM concepts in the stories. In addition to the story itself, interactive elements will promote repeat use and retention of STEM concepts. The objective of this Phase I activity is to demonstrate that the platform can augment existing STEM curriculum and generate interest in basic science and engineering concepts in the prekindergarten and kindergarten classroom environment. 4 of 8

5 10:45-10:55 Waltz Networks Nithin Michael The broader impact/commercial potential of this SBIR is that it could dramatically increase the efficiency of communication networks. The ability to dynamically, adaptively and optimally route traffic on data networks is expected to lead to network cost savings of 60% - 70% for network service providers. The project leverages the recent industry shift towards software-defined networking (SDN) that is projected to address a $35 billion market by The excitement behind SDN is driven primarily by the promised performance benefits of better traffic control. The company plans to capitalize on this market shift by implementing its optimized, dynamic and adaptive traffic control algorithms in SDN-controlled data networks. End users will have access to faster, cheaper and more robust data networks. In the longer term, efficient software control of networks will enable rapid innovation in networking, leading to new network applications that have not yet been envisioned. Today, due to unprecedented traffic growth, network operators face major challenges in efficient resource utilization. The problem is that the inherent randomness of data traffic has led to network designers over-provisioning networks to the point that they currently run at 30% - 40% utilization on average. The company s competitive advantage is a new algorithm that will enable optimal management of traffic variations by adjusting network routes in real time while retaining the scalability and simplicity of today s protocols. 5 of 8

6 10:55-11:05 EduNova Rick Kamal This SBIR will design, build, and test a web-based, modular curriculum for providing rigorous, accessible, and engaging computer science (CS) education to grades 9-10 students. The U.S. is experiencing two human resources gaps in computing. First, by 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts there will be 1.2 million more CS related jobs than Americans trained to fill them. Second, female, African-American and Latino student participation remains stubbornly low. This results in a loss of talent and innovation for America, and lost career opportunities for U.S. students. Research suggests these gaps are the result of too few students being introduced early to rigorous and compelling CS education. Currently, 19% of U.S. high-school students take a CS class, a percentage that has fallen over the last two decade. This issue is further exacerbated by a lack of qualified CS teachers. The Phase 1 project prototype will be an easy-to-implement, student-driven mechanism to provide standards-based CS instruction. Unlike current initiatives that narrowly focus on programming, this prototype will align with standards developed by the nation s leading organizations for computing professionals and will allow undertrained instructors to provide comprehensive CS courses to students. The proposed project will provide high school students with an engaging and rigorous introduction to CS, and a clear pathway to college-level study and careers in CS and computing-related fields. 6 of 8

7 11:15-11:25 STEMKids LLC Mary Jean Koontz This SBIR will produce an online Matching Tool for Middle School teachers to connect with Science, Math, Engineering and Technology (STEM) experts and find STEM Project-Based-Learning (PBL) products. With this Matching Tool, teachers will be able to connect virtually with diverse STEM experts for teacher and student mentoring, virtual discussions and presentations; find PBL products for individual and group projects; and locate diverse STEM experts who are familiar with PBL products and projects. STEM experts will be recruited during the project with an emphasis on women, people with disabilities, underrepresented minorities and veterans. Middle School is a key stage in children s education and aspirations. The broader impact of the project is to bring real-time, diverse faces of STEM experts both to the teacher and into the classroom thus increasing children s self-esteem and interest in STEM by using the if you can see it, you can be it truth in education. The central goal of this project is to create strong and measurable links between STEM experts and Middle School teachers and students, thus inspiring America s next generation of STEM experts and teachers. With widespread commercialization of the tool, the resulting connection between industry experts, teachers and students should provide industry STEM mentors to over 12,000 middle school teachers via a network of over 100,000 STEM experts in the first two years. 7 of 8

8 11:25-11:35 Virta Laboratories, Inc. Denis Foo Kune The broader impact/commercial potential of this SBIR is the improvement of trustworthy software execution. The proposed system, composed of a hardware monitoring device and a cloud-based security analytics engine, will detect process anomalies and malware in equipment where traditional anti-virus products cannot be installed. This solution externally observes system activity by analyzing side-channel phenomena such as power consumption. Unlike traditional anti-virus products that may interfere with normal operations and require constant updates, these side-channel measurements are independent of the software running on commercial equipment such as medical devices or point-of-sale terminals. The proposed method processes those measurements with a continuous cloud-based machine-learning engine and integrates multiple data sources to provide IT professionals with a reliable source of timely, actionable results. If successful, this project will help technicians quickly catch anomalous behavior, including malware, before it spreads to other devices. Many commercial appliances, such as medical devices, run commodity operating systems but cannot support traditional anti-virus programs that consume precious resources and require frequent database updates. This incompatibility has resulted in widespread malware infections on equipment at hospitals, retailers and critical facilities. The proposed research will involve continuously monitoring the power consumption side-channel without disrupting normal operations. 8 of 8