Special Program Announcement for 2011 Office of Naval Research Applied Research : Data to Decision

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The primary purpose of the Data-to-Decision (D2D) Program is to develop a capability to rapidly develop, evaluate, and field prototype Decision Support Systems. To accomplish this goal, the D2D program has identified the creation of a library of flexible modules that can be easily repurposed, or modified, to meet the needs of many National Security applications as a critical need. This library will form an open architecture basis for the rapid development of new prototype decision support systems. Additionally, the architecture should allow these modules to be rapidly reconfigured, should be sufficiently flexible to enable easy upgrades of existing modules and should allow insertion of new or alternative modules created by innovative organizations. To help focus on the development of these broadly applicable modules, the program will be conducted using a series of cross-service challenge problems centered on specific sensing modalities. Data will be provided at the unclassified level, to ensure all innovative ideas can be captured, and at the operational level to make sure the solutions work with real data development that will generally occur through open consortiums delivering specific capabilities in contrast to a program in which the offeror has unique measures of success and operates independently. The system will be built on an open-architecture testbed running a Service Oriented Architecture with distributed nodes. The testbed will be built, owned and operated by a government team and will be used to perform research and module development in advanced user interfaces, analytics and data management. The testbed itself will consist of 100+ high performance nodes on a 10 GB Ethernet backbone. Between 0.5-1.0 petabyte of storage will be provided, and there will be a mix of different memory types to support research in storage architectures and efficient data access and retrieval. The system will be fully partitionable and reconfigurable to support research in grid vs. cloud architectures, algorithm scalability, data indexing, common data representation and other modules as identified or needed. Details regarding the Application Program Interfaces (API’s) and hardware will be supplied to offerors that have been selected for an awardONR, on behalf of DDR&E, plans to fund eight (8) to ten (10) individual awards with a value of $300,000 to $750,000 per year. However, lower and higher cost proposals will be considered. The Research and Development (R&D) efforts to be funded consist of Applied Research. The funds available to support awards are budget Activity 6.2. The period of performance for projects may be from one (1) to four (4) years. Although ONR expects the above described program plan to be executed, ONR reserve the right to make changes. Funding decisions should be made on or about 29 April 2011. Projects will have an estimated contract award or grant date of 01 August 2011. ***********************************************Applicants shall NOT apply under this Special Notice. Applicants shall apply using the Application Instructions and Package under ONRBAA11-001 by 21 April 2011.

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