Pitch Your Big Idea to NGA
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency opportunities for innovation
Funding Opportunity Number: HM0476-20-BAA-0001
Introduction
The mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Research Directorate is to deliver future Geospatial-Intelligence (GEOINT) capabilities to users for operational impact. NGA Research supports the National Security Strategy by solving hard defense and intelligence problems for the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense and in support of this mission
The Boosting Innovative GEOINT-Research Broad Agency Announcement (BIG-R BAA) invites proposers to submit innovative basic and applied research and development concepts that address one or more of the following technical domains:
Foundational GEOINT. The Foundational GEOINT portion of the Research portfolio focuses on the creation of always accurate, high-resolution, continually updated representations of the earth’s properties, available on demand. Topics of interest in this domain include, but are not limited to, innovations advancing the GEOINT physical sciences in the areas of: (1) terrestrial/celestial reference frames, (2) earth gravitational models, (3) world magnetic models, (4) assured positioning, navigation and timing, and resilience, (5) geopositioning, (6) feature extraction, attribution, classification and modeling, (7) infrastructure models, (8) human geography and environmental models, (9) bathymetric/topological models, and (10) maritime environmental mapping.
Advanced Phenomenologies. The Advanced Phenomenologies portion of the portfolio employs novel methods and efficient strategies to drive development and delivery of improved spatially, spectrally and temporally resolved data from a growing number of traditional and non-traditional sources. Topics of interest in this domain include, but are not limited to, innovations advancing the design and development of algorithms, components, and enabling technologies for systems in the areas of: (1) detection, tracking, and identification of the most challenging targets in complex environments, (2) sensing and real-time processing of both static and dynamic targets, (3) novel source exploitation and optimization, (4) collection technologies to optimize use of phenomenology sources, (5) space situational awareness, (6) information assurance, data integrity and quality validation, (7) error propagation modeling, and (8) multi-domain data aggregation.
Analytic Technologies. The Analytic Technologies portion of the portfolio enhances the definition and utility of GEOINT by leveraging new sources of data and developing novel analytic techniques to deliver a geospatial dimension to multi-INT analytics, in particular to address emerging threats and mission domains. New data sources drive us of these technologies to provide accurate, timely, reliable and scalable methods for data exploitation, integration, and analysis. Topics of interest in this domain include, but are not limited to, innovations in advanced processing techniques and enabling technologies for (1) geospatial signatures detection, analysis, and tracking, (2) derivation of GEOINT from non-traditional data in cyberspace, (3) stand-off detection of counter proliferation and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive activities, (4) water security, (5) image/video understanding and computer vision, (6) image and product standards development and enhancement, (7) automatic target recognition, (8) temporal and activity modeling and contextualization, (9) event forecasting and prediction, (10) knowledge and ontology modeling, (11) artificial intelligence, to include novel learning techniques, (12) automation, to include software tools, (13) natural language processing, (14) social media analytics, (15) location-based insights, (16) workflow effectiveness and analyst workflow modernization, (17) human-machine interaction, (18) tools that provide better human understanding of automated solutions, (19) tools to guide algorithm and automation governance, and (20) immersive GEOINT visualization tools.
NGA will post amendments to this BAA, including new topic announcements, to:
https://beta.sam.gov/ (beta SAM) and http://www.grants.gov