DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH (SBIR) PROGRAM SBIR 21.4 Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Army Applied SBIR Opportunity (ASO) Announcement November 16, 2021: ASO issued for pre-release November 30, 2021: Army begins accepting proposals January 4, 2022: Deadline for receipt of proposals no later than 12:00 p.m. ET IMPORTANT Deadline for Receipt : Proposals must be completely submitted no later than 12:00 p.m. ET, January 4, 2022. Proposals submitted after 12:00 p.m. will not be evaluated. The final proposal submission includes successful completion of all firm level forms, all required volumes, and electronic corporate official certification. Classified proposals will not be accepted under the DoD SBIR Program. This BAA and the Defense SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal (DSIP) sites are designed to reduce the time and cost required to prepare a formal proposal. The DSIP is the official portal for DoD SBIR/STTR proposal submission. Proposers are required to submit proposals via DSIP; proposals submitted by any other means will be disregarded. Proposers submitting through this site for the first time will be asked to register. Effective with this announcement, firms are required to register for a login.gov account and link it to their DSIP account. See section 4.14 for more information regarding registration. The Small Business Administration, through its SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, purposely departs from normal Government solicitation formats and requirements and authorizes agencies to simplify the SBIR/STTR award process and minimize the regulatory burden on small business. Therefore, consistent with the SBA SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, the Department of Defense is soliciting proposals as a Broad Agency Announcement. SBIR/STTR Updates and Notices: To be notified of SBIR/STTR opportunities and to receive e-mail updates on the DoD SBIR and STTR Programs, you are invited to subscribe to our Listserv by emailing
[email protected]. Help Desk: If you have questions about the Defense Department's SBIR or STTR Programs, please call the DoD SBIR/STTR Help Desk at 1-703-214-1333, or email to
[email protected]. Topic Q&A : The Topic Q&A for this BAA opens on November 16, 2021 and closes to new questions on December 21, 2021 at 12:00 PM ET. Proposers may submit written questions through Topic Q&A at https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/submissions/login or through the SBIR Mailbox at usarmy.pentagon.hqda-asa-alt.mbx.army-applied-sbir-program@mail.mil. In Topic Q&A, the questioner and respondent remain anonymous and all questions and answers are posted electronically for general viewing. Once the BAA closes to proposal submission, no communication of any kind with the topic author or through Topic Q&A regarding your submitted proposal is allowed. Questions should be limited to specific information related to improving the understanding of a particular topic’s requirements. Proposing firms may not ask for advice or guidance on solution approach and you may not submit additional material to the topic author. If information provided during an exchange with the topic author is deemed necessary for proposal preparation, that information will be made available to all parties through Topic Q&A. Proposing firms are advised to monitor Topic Q&A during the BAA period for questions and answers. Proposing firms should also frequently monitor DSIP for updates and amendments to the topics. This Army Applied SBIR Opportunity (ASO) is issued under the Army Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for SBIR/STTR 21.4. All proposals in response to the technical area(s) described herein will be submitted in accordance with the instructions provided under 21.4, found here: https://beta.sam.gov/opp/b79ded14dcf54451bcfb11bddf5cd259/view?keywords=%22army%20sbir%22&sort=-relevance&index=opp&is_active=true&page=1. a. Eligibility The eligibility requirements for the SBIR/STTR programs are unique and do not correspond to those of other small business programs. Please refer to Section 3.1, Eligible Applicants, of BAA 21.4 for full eligibility requirements. b. Anticipated Structure/Award Information Phase I Please refer to Section 1, Funding Opportunity Description, provided in BAA 21.4 for detailed information regarding SBIR/STTR phase structure and flexibility. For this BAA, the Department of the Army will accept Phase I proposals for the cost of up to $250,000 for a 6-month period of performance. Proposers should refer to Section 4, Application and Submission information, of BAA 21.4 for detailed proposal preparation instructions. Proposals that do not comply with the requirements detailed in BAA 21.4 and the research objectives of this ASO are considered non-conforming and therefore are not evaluated nor considered for award. Phase I proposals shall not exceed 5 pages. Phase I commercialization strategy shall not exceed 10 slides. This should be the last section of the Technical Volume and will not count against the 5-page limit. Please refer to Appendix A of BAA 21.4 for detailed instructions on Phase I proposal preparation. Phase II Please refer to Section 1, Funding Opportunity Description, provided in BAA 21.4 for detailed information regarding SBIR/STTR phase structure and flexibility. For this BAA, Department of the Army will accept Phase II proposals for the cost of up to $1,700,000 for an 18-month period of performance. Proposers should refer to Section 4, Application and Submission information, of BAA 21.4 for detailed proposal preparation instructions. Proposals that do not comply with the requirements detailed in BAA 21.4 and the research objectives of this ASO are considered non-conforming and therefore are not evaluated nor considered for award. Phase II proposals shall not exceed 10 pages. Phase II commercialization strategy shall not exceed 10 slides. This should be the last section of the Technical Volume and will not count against the 10-page limit. Please refer to Appendix A of BAA 21.4 for detailed instructions on Phase II proposal preparation. c. Evaluation of Proposals Section 5, Evaluation of Proposals, in BAA 21.4 provides detailed information on proposal evaluation and the selection process for this ASO. d . Discretionary Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) Participation in the Army applied SBIR TABA program is voluntary for each Army Applied SBIR awardee. Services provided to Army Applied SBIR firms under the auspices of the TABA program may include, but are not limited to: Access to a network of scientists, engineers, and technologists focused on commercialization and transition considerations such as protected supply chain management, advanced manufacturing, process/product/production scaling, etc; Assistance with intellectual property protections, such as legal considerations, intellectual property rights, patent filing, patent fees, licensing considerations, etc; Commercialization and technology transition support such as market research, market validation, development of regulatory or manufacturing plans, brand development; Regulatory support such as product domain regulatory considerations, regulatory planning, and regulatory strategy development. Vendors. The Army will select a preferred vendor for the Army Applied SBIR TABA program through a competitive process. Alternately, a small business concern may, by contract or otherwise, select one or more vendors to assist the firm in meeting the goals listed above. The Applicant must request the authority to select its own TABA provider in the Applied SBIR proposal, demonstrating that the vendor is uniquely postured to provide the specific technical and business services required. Participation. Participation in the Army Applied SBIR TABA program is voluntary for each Army Applied SBIR awardee. If a small business concern selects their own vendor, they must include the request in the Applied SBIR proposal. If a small business concern opts to use the Army preferred vendor, the firm may opt into the program at any time during execution of the SBIR project. Resources. The Applied SBIR program sponsors participation in the TABA program. The resource limitation for each firm is: Phase I Firms: Up to $6,500 per project per year (in addition to the base SBIR award amount); Phase II Firms: Up to $50,000 per project; Army-Preferred Vendor: In addition to the base SBIR award amount; Firm-Selected Vendor: Included in the base SBIR award amount and must be included in Phase II proposal. e. Due Date/Time Full proposal packages (Proposal Cover Sheet, Technical Volume, Price/Cost Volume, and Company Commercialization Report inclusive of supporting documentation) must be submitted via the DoD SBIR/STTR Proposal Submission website per the instructions outlined in BAA 21.4 Section 4.3 Electronic Submission no later than 12:00 p.m. ET, January 4, 2022. Army SBIR 21.4 Topic Index A214-050 Natural Language Processing+ A214-50 TITLE: Natural Language Processing+ OBJECTIVE: The objective of this topic is to develop Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning models to augment Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities in 2 main challenge areas: relationship detection and aggregation – automatically detecting relationships that exist between the entities that were extracted from the data. Some extracting attributes of entities include: hair color, nationality, model of tank, armor of tank. Pattern recognition, analysis, and exploitation – automatically recognizing patterns such as indications and warnings and courses of actions and analyzing them – is an integral part of this topic. DESCRIPTION: The purpose of this topic is to demonstrate how novel approaches and techniques can address these challenge areas and to develop prototypes that can be transitioned into PM IS&A’s products. PM IS&A products will empower the intel analyst by providing them with access to critical data/information and advanced analytics. NLP is a critical capability for PM IS&A products that is necessary to make sense of large amounts of unstructured data from multiple unclassified and classified sources. Unfortunately, today’s technology struggles at adequately addressing this problem. This should be done by reducing the cognitive load on the intel analyst, improving situational awareness and situational understanding for the war fighter and intel analyst, addressing gaps in the existing NLP technologies, and improving data fusion and pattern recognition and analysis tools that are used for intelligence applications. Currently, information is manually extracted by people. Today, intel analysts spend half of their time looking for the golden nugget in massive amounts of data sets by using a mixture of techniques and tools. Today’s NLP technologies excel at very specific tasks such as identifying attributes and extracting attributes from entities (not correlating back to either other). We propose developing AI/ML models to help augment the NLP technologies. Based on Industry Engagements over the last 12 months, small portion of Industry Partners have started to introduce AI/ML modeling to improve NLP performance. This provides us confidence in the approach to leverage AI/ML modeling to augment NLP technology PHASE I: In order for a work to proceed directly to the Phase II level (a Direct to Phase II or DP2), proposing firms must be able to substantiate that their technology is currently at an acceptable stage and that the scientific and technical merit and feasibility at the Phase I level has already been met. The proposal package should clearly describe the scientific, technical, and commercial merits of the proposed concept and the resulting prototype that may have been developed. Documents that should be provided for each of the areas are indicated below. As part of your proposal package, please provide any of these documents that presently exist, or other documentation that exists which you feel provides comparable or additionally-relevant information. Scientific Merit may include: list of peer reviewed whitepapers and/or conference proceedings that have been published or presented on the concept; any awards, writeups, endorsements, or recognition received. Technical Merit may include description of the technical problem that the specific problem will attempt to solve and how; technical demo (recorded); technical report that describes key technical performance parameters such as results, description of technical approach with diagrams, and/or description of technical rigor that is employed. Commercial Merit may include: strategy for commercializing the technology and transitions it to government/industry; commercialization roadmap including costs and schedule; perceived impact or value and how technology can be integrated in a commercial setting. Feasibility Studies that address these areas are: legal, economic, operational, technical, and scheduling. PHASE II: Phase II will consist of awarding a few proposals to be expanded upon through additional Research and Technology Development, which will lead to Early Prototyping. PHASE III: Phase III will consist of the transition to Commercialization phase to PM IS&A KEYWORDS: Natural language processing; analytics; automated intelligence; machine learning; REFERENCES: https://blogs.sas.com/content/sascom/2019/02/13/nlp-for-military-intelligence/ https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/10635/1063507/Artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-for-future-army-applications/10.1117/12.2307753.full?SSO=1