Army Research Laboratory, ALC Procurement Division, ATTN: AMSRL-CS-AL-PC, 2800 Powder Mill Road, Adelphi, MD 20783-1197

A -- FY97 ARL BAA AMENDED SYNOPSIS SOL DAAL01-97-R-ARL SOL DAAL01-97-R-ARL POC POC: Karen Wishnow, ARL BAA Coordinator, (301) 394-3690, kwishnow@arl.mil. FY97 ARL BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT -- Amendment 4 -- This amendment is available in its entirety on the ARL homepage (http://w3.arl.mil/baa). On January 21, 1997 the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) announced the Dual Use Applications Program's (DUAP) Science and Technology (S&T) Initiative. This initiative has two primary purposes. First is the development of dual use technologies with industry. Second is to educate the Services on the use of flexible mechanisms such as 10 USC 2371 "Other Transactions" and cooperative agreements. The minimum requirements of the S&T Initiative are as follows: 1. Development of dual use technology with industry 2. Congressional direction requires that at least 50 percent of the cost of any project under this initiative be provided by industry 3. Projects must be awarded using non-procurement agreements, i.e. Cooperative Agreements or "Other Transactions." 4. The projects have to result in the development of a technology not the application of a technology. Each of the Services is to identify research topics where Defense and industry have mutual interests and can work together to develop technologies to ensure both defense and commercial needs are met. The purpose of this amendment is to identify those research topics of interest to ARL, solicit proposals, and set forth the unique requirements for any resultant proposals. Proposals submitted under this amendment are subject to requirements which differ from those set forth in the ARL BAA in the following areas: 1. Research Topics 2. White Paper Preparation and Submission 3. Proposal Preparation and Submission 4. Proposal Evaluation 5. To be considered for award, all proposals submitted under this amendment must be received at ARL by 4:30 Eastern Time on 14 April 1997 at the following address: U.S. Army Research Laboratory, ALC Procurement Division, (S&T Initiative), ATTN: AMSRL-CS-AL-PC, (Beth Minnick -- BAA Monitor), 2800 Powder Mill Road, Adelphi, MD 20783-1197 -- Proposals submitted under this amendment are limited to the following research topics: Topic 1 -- Defensive Information Warfare -- Provide basic research and technology development related to the enhancement of security and survivability of next-generation Army Tactical Battlefield Networks and Information Systems. Research topics include: NETWORKS/COMMUNICATION -- Secure multiple access schemes for Low Probability of Intercept/Anti-Jam (LPI/AJ) wireless communications; Adaptive distributed routing and mobility management; Fault tolerant and secure network management and control; Algorithms to permit self-healing networks; Authentication techniques for secure mobile Internet Protocol-based communication; Network interface device fingerprinting -- INTRUSION PREVENTION, DETECTION, RECOVERY -- Data security, integrity, and availability; Resource/Application security, integrity, and availability; Threat indications and warnings; Intrusion recognition, characterization, and isolation; Automated Information Warfare damage assessment and recovery; Malicious code indentification and neutralization -- The intent of the proposal must be the development of dual use technology; that is, the technology will have both military relevance and sufficent potential commercial; applicability to support a viable production base. (TPOC: Dr. Jay Gowens, (301) 394-2100) Topic 2 -- High-accuracy Optical Character Recognition (OCR) -- ARL and its partners seek proposals for dual use development of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that can provide accurate, high-quality electronic representations of foreign language documents for use in archiving, machine translation, information retrieval, etc. Previous OCR methods have been restricted by imprecise character segmentation tuned to future-dash based recognition are intrinsically limited in the accuracy they can attain. Recent experiments to apply statistical methods from speech recognition technology, such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM), demonstrate dramatic reductions in character recognition error rates and constitute a significant breakthrough in the state of the OCR. Some systems incorporate tailorable lexicons that are used to drive document decoding. However, ARL is interested in the combination of HMM-based OCR with other techniques to address out-of-vocabulary work problem found in these word-based systems. Development of fast, trainable, accurate and easy-to-use OCR software is desired. The resulting system will exhibit the following features: prodcution in a least one military critical language (e.g. Arabic, Korean): production may also include a commercially central language (e.g. English, Spanish); incorporation of target-language lexicon that is easily accessible by users for changes and additions, as well as flexible techniques to address out-of-vocabulary words; delivery on readily available, portable computer platforms current at completion of project (approximate 2 years out). (TPOC: Melissa Holland, (301) 394-3001) All responsible sources may submit a bid or proposal which will be considered by the Agency. No telephone requests will be honored. (0062)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0013 19970305\A-0013.SOL)