The BIG-ST BAA invites proposers to submit innovative concepts to address hard GEOINT problems that align to one or more of the following technical domains:

(1) Foundational GEOINT

(2) Advanced Phenomenologies

(3) Analytic Technologies

The BIG-ST BAA is a general announcement of NGA’s research interest, including criteria for selecting proposals and soliciting the participation of all offerors capable of satisfying the Government’s needs.

The requests for abstracts and/or proposals are transmitted via Topic Calls that are published separately under the BIG-ST BAA General Solicitation at various times during the open period of the General Solicitation. Topic Calls will be published via updates to the BIG-ST BAA General Solicitation site on Sam.gov, Grants.gov (Opportunity ID:351404), and/or the Acquisition Research Center (https://acq.westfields.net). Interested parties should periodically check these websites for updates.

No submissions shall be accepted to the General Solicitation; abstracts and proposals will only be reviewed in response to Topic Calls.  Please refer to the Topic Calls for Abstract and Proposal due dates.

Closed Topics:

Topic 1 – Geospatial-Intelligence Foundational Model (GFM) is closed

Topic 2 – Magnifying University Science Expertise (MUSE) is closed.

Topic 3 – VLBI+G Signal Chain Development (VLBI+G) is closed.

Canceled Topics:

Topic 4 – Production of Radio Frequency (RF) Surveys from Commercial On-orbit Passive RF (RF-COP) is cancelled.

Active Topics:

Topic 5 – Better Ingested GEOINT – Identifying Artificial Intelligence and Manually Manipulated Media (BIGISLAND) is open.

Review the NGA BIGISLAND BAA.

Source: SAM

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The team developed browser-based technology that allows analysts to stream and manipulate 3D data types in real time. This new capability integrates cloud-optimized point clouds, digital surface models, and mesh surfaces into a single workflow, eliminating previous barriers between different data formats.

Working with the widely used Quick Terrain Modeler (QTM) platform, the team created new tools for visibility analysis across large geographic areas. These improvements help analysts better understand line-of-sight (LOS) relationships and accommodate various viewing scenarios, including satellite perspectives.

“We set out to solve complex challenges in 3D data analysis and we’re delivering solutions with immediate mission impact,” said Stephen Grover, CEO of GCS Geospatial. “These tools represent an evolution of 3D geodata analysis in ways that just weren’t possible or thought of before.”

The project also advanced open-source technology through updates to the GDAL library. A new cumulative viewshed feature gives analysts deeper insights into visibility patterns across wide areas. These improvements are now available in recent GDAL releases, benefiting the broader geospatial community.

Source: GCS Geospatial

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The mission of the 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.

In support of this mission, NGA Research promotes research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines, and transforms these initiatives into disruptive GEOINT capabilities in support of U.S. national security. The BIG-ST BAA invites proposers to submit innovative concepts to address hard GEOINT problems that align to one or more of the following technical domains: (1) Foundational GEOINT, (2) Advanced Phenomenologies, and (3) Analytic Technologies. Throughout the open period of this BAA, posted Topic Calls will specify areas associated with these technical domains.

Each posted Topic Call will provide specific timelines for abstract and proposal submission. Proposers are responsible for maintaining awareness of these Topic Calls and associated timelines for submissions. No submissions shall be accepted to the general solicitation; abstracts and proposals will only be reviewed in response to Topic Calls.

The BIG-ST BAA is a general announcement of NGA’s research interest, including criteria for selecting proposals and soliciting the participation of all offerors capable of satisfying the Government’s needs.

The requests for abstracts and/or proposals are transmitted via Topic Calls that are published separately under the BIG-ST BAA general solicitation at various times during the open period of the general solicitation.

Review the changes to the BIG-ST BAA.

Source: SAM

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Intent of this Topic Call is the award of academic grants only.

This Topic Call seeks to increase the breadth and depth of knowledge to key science and technology areas of need to the geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) community and advance the state of practice in two subject areas:

1. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
2. Geodesy

Due Dates:

Questions: Due on 04/02/2024 @ 05:00pm ET

Abstracts: Due on 04/23/2024 @ 5:00pm ET

Proposals: Due on 06/07/2024 @ 5:00pm ET (Note: Proposers who do not submit an abstract are ineligible to submit a proposal.)

Contact Email for Topic 02: Unclassified: BIGSTBAA@nga.mil (Email Subject: ‘TOPIC 02 – MUSE’)

The BIG-ST BAA invites proposers to submit innovative concepts to address hard GEOINT problems that align to one or more of the following technical domains:

(1) Foundational GEOINT

(2) Advanced Phenomenologies

(3) Analytic Technologies

About the BIG-ST BAA: The BIG-ST BAA is a general announcement of NGA’s research interest, including criteria for selecting proposals and soliciting the participation of all offerors capable of satisfying the Government’s needs. The requests for abstracts and/or proposals are transmitted via Topic Calls that are published separately under the BIG-ST BAA general solicitation at various times during the open period of the general solicitation.

Review the NGA MUSE information.

Source: SAM

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The BIG-ST BAA invites proposers to submit innovative concepts to address hard GEOINT problems that align to one or more of the following technical domains:

(1) Foundational GEOINT

(2) Advanced Phenomenologies

(3) Analytic Technologies

The BIG-ST BAA is a general announcement of NGA’s research interest, including criteria for selecting proposals and soliciting the participation of all offerors capable of satisfying the Government’s needs. The requests for abstracts and/or proposals are transmitted via Topic Calls that are published separately under the BIG-ST BAA general solicitation at various times during the open period of the general solicitation. The BIG-ST BAA General Solicitation, HM047623BAA0001, is posted and applies to Topic 1 and forward.  Topic 1 – Geospatial-Intelligence Foundational Model (GFM) is active.

Questions Due on 01/02/2024 @ 5:00pm ET

Abstracts Due on 01/23/2024 @ 5:00pm ET

Proposals Due on 03/04/2024 @ 5:00pm ET

This research topic will explore approaches to developing a new type of Multimodal Foundation Model (MFM) to ingest overhead and ground-level imagery, vector data, terrain data, and ground level images, then show adaptability to perform novel, previously unencountered tasks without being retrained. It will answer specific geospatial questions with verifiable precision and accuracy paired with a rigorously determined level of confidence that can be expressed to an analyst, which will communicate the amount of trust that can be placed in the machine generated answer. It will demonstrate how performance scales with the size of the network designed for geospatial information.

This research topic covers GFM, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), multimodal machine learning, contrastive machine learning, masked autoencoding, unsupervised machine learning, semi- and self-supervised machine learning, fully supervised machine learning, transformer architectures, cross view image matching, neural networks, Vision Transformers, Shifted Windows (SWIN) Transformers, remote sensing, and geographic information system (GIS).

The goal of this research will be to deliver a geographically aware foundational model–or assembly of foundation models–that can form components of a powerful virtual assistant for analysts to geolocate media or objects or answer questions requiring specific geospatial understanding.  By the end of the program, the assistant should be able to save analysts significant time in searching for, and within, geospatial sources.

Review the BIG-ST BAA Topic 1 information.

Source: SAM

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The government intends to host a “GEOCOG Industry Day Conference” in conjunction with this topic to outline challenges, concerns, and expectations to potential proposers within this new technology area. The industry day is planned for November 8.

Geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. GEOINT includes tasks involving collection, sense-making, and analysis of data and imagery to survey physical features, assess human activity, and make spatial decisions. GEOINT data and tools have dramatically increased in recent years, providing many options to complete different GEOINT tasks.

As a result, NGA is undergoing a human–systems interaction and integration paradigm shift. With the emergence of new automated algorithms and tools, combined with increased computing power, tasks that were once exclusively human now squarely fall within the machine system domain; while others can be partially performed by computing machines with oversight and inputs from humans in- or on- the loop being required for only specific aspects of the task.

By offloading and allocating numerous, routine tasks to automated computing systems, this new analytic teaming landscape promises information processing and decision making at mission speed and mission scale at orders of magnitude beyond the capability of humans. Finding the right balance in task allocation that maximizes the value from both humans and machines requires a rigorous, systematic approach to measure and track performance on multiple scales, the result being an effective functional allocation and human–machine teaming that augments analysts’ cognitive abilities (i.e., visuo-spatial attention, sense-making, and decision making) to fully execute missions with appropriate tools.

This topic seeks to assess the potential cognitive benefits and/or costs of introducing a new analytic tool, interaction or visualization method, and/or dataset into the analyst’s workflow through a multi-method approach to map the human element of GEOINT tradecraft — the GEOINT cognitive architecture (GEOCOG).

The primary objective of the GEOCOG program is to leverage advances in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience to improve GEOINT workflow effectiveness, augment sense-making, and optimize human performance under the rapidly evolving technology landscape. The purpose of GEOCOG is to investigate and develop low-cost, unobtrusive methods to objectively measure, estimate, and model analysts’ cognitive states during human–machine teaming for optimal performance. Specifically, GEOCOG seeks to develop human performance metrics to quantify the impact of new tools, datasets, and/or tradecraft on the efficacy of GEOINT workflows and the analyst’s capabilities.

The contractor shall develop and deliver a revolutionary platform prototype to capture quantitative data on user behaviors, task performance, and cognitive states and to analyze the impact of various automated technologies on human capabilities at much finer scales than the usual qualitative methods in practice today.

Review NGA’s full GEOCOG BIG-R BAA topic.

Source: SAM

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NGA’s Research Directorate will conduct a Proposers Day webcast to provide information to potential proposers about the objectives of the Boosting Innovative GEOINT Research Broad Agency Announcement (BIG-R BAA) Topic Three, NGA Research Innovative Seedlings. The Proposers Day will be held via WebEx Events on May 21, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM. Advance registration is required. Note, all times listed in this announcement and on the registration website are Eastern Daylight Time.

The goals of the Topic Three Proposers Day are to introduce the research community (proposers, academia, and government) to the NGA Research Directorate vision and goals; explain the mechanics and milestones of the BIG-R BAA; and provide insight into the technical areas of interest.

The BIG-R BAA Topic Three was published February 17, 2021. NGA will accept abstracts until 4:30 PM ET on July 31, 2021, and accept proposals until 4:30 PM ET on September 30, 2021. Abstracts and proposals may be submitted at any time until the associated due date.

To maximize the pool of innovative proposal concepts, NGA strongly encourages non‐traditional proposers (including small businesses, academic and research institutions, and first‐time government contractors) to participate in events such as this and related solicitation.

TOPIC OBJECTIVE AND DESCRIPTION

Topic Three of the BIG-R BAA seeks innovative ideas and concepts in the NGA Research technical domain application areas. These technical domain application areas include foundation, geophysics, geospatial cyber, image and video, predictive analytics, radar, space, spectral science, and cross-cutting programs. The purpose of a seedling project is to advance innovative concepts toward maturity by mitigating one or more early stage risks during the seedling period of performance.

The ultimate goal is for these seedlings to inform and/or be developed into technologies that can directly contribute to one or more of the NGA mission imperatives: assured positioning, navigation, timing and targeting; accelerated tasking orchestration; data access/integrity; and analytic workflow modernization.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

The NGA Research Innovative Seedlings Proposers Day will be webcast via WebEx Events on May 21, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM. Note, all times listed in this announcement and on the registration website are Eastern Daylight Time. There is no registration fee for the Proposers Day webcast.

Registration opens: As of publication of this announcement.

Registration website: https://nga.webex.com/nga/onstage/g.php?MTID=ebb29fcc2170e5d62bddc8927a305c2c1

Registration closes: May 14, 2021 at 04:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time or when capacity is reached, whichever comes first.

Full information is available here.

Source: SAM

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The internet has created an exponentially expanding source of image data. Images and video shared publicly on websites can assist NGA in understanding the world.  During natural disasters, images of destruction assist first responders in conducting infrastructure damage assessment, identifying injured people, and planning search and rescue efforts. This information can also provide context to past events.

It is challenging to precisely locate images and videos posted on social media and websites because they are typically stripped of metadata that identify where and when the image was taken. Photographs or videos without a verified location provide much less value to NGA customers.

NGA Research seeks novel ways to search enormous volumes of world reference data to rapidly geolocate open source imagery and video. NGA Research leverages experiences from past projects and experiments with published neural network technologies.

Experiment results indicate no single source of global reference data is sufficiently comprehensive to deliver the required precision. NGA Research expects that viable solutions will require multiple steps, each leveraging a specific set of reference data. NGA Research engineered a multi-step process that begins with the selection of a general area of the world, much like the im2GPS, PlaNET, or GeoEstimation solutions.  The second step delivers a small set of candidate locations by leveraging feature extraction to recognize specific items in the media and comparing those items to a global 40-80 terabyte reference data set of terrain and map features. This BAA only seeks solutions to a specific portion of the second step that forms a processing bottleneck:  a rapid search capability. NGA Research has completed the development of the feature extraction capability for the media. Features for each image query will be provided to the Proposers. NGA Research will not consider funding solutions addressing the neural network-based first step at this time. Any solution considered will address the indexing and searching of the terrain and map features.

Scope and Objectives

The objective of this topic is to advance research in hashing and indexing techniques that organize features in a large data set and enable rapid high dimensional searches to determine the geolocation of media taken at ground level. NGA Research will not consider a pure neural network solution based on machine learning of ground level photos alone.

Full information is available here.

Source: SAM

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The Boosting Innovative GEOINT Research BAA, known as the BIG-R BAA, enables NGA to adopt phased approaches and use multiple contract instruments to target expertise, mitigate risk and create an innovative environment for developing new capabilities. NGA published the primary BIG-R BAA in July 2020.

“At NGA we are working on today’s geospatial intelligence mission, but tomorrow’s mission is also constantly on our minds,” said John Main, PhD, chief scientist for NGA research. “The BIG-R BAA helps us connect with researchers in industry and academia and apply their work to our national security mission.”

The new topic is titled “NGA Research Wide Innovative Seedlings” and points to NGA’s interest in concepts that create new capabilities within the NGA Mission Imperatives: Assured Positioning, Navigation, Timing & Targeting; Accelerated Tasking Orchestration; Data Access/Integrity; and Analytic Workflow Modernization.

NGA will evaluate proposed concepts in the context of the agency’s research focus areas: Analytic Technologies, Foundational GEOINT and Advanced Phenomenologies.

Submit classified abstracts and proposals through the Acquisition Research Center (ARC) website at https://acq.nro.ic.gov and send a separate email notification to BIGRBAA@nga.mil to ensure receipt. Submit unclassified abstracts and proposals through https://beta.sam.gov, solicitation number HM0476-20-BAA-0001, or http://www.grants.gov. Send questions to BIGRBAA@nga.mil.

Source: NGA

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The Boosting Innovative GEOINT Research BAA, known as the BIG-R BAA, enables NGA to adopt phased approaches and use multiple contract instruments to target expertise, mitigate risk and create an innovative environment for developing disruptive capabilities.

“The release of this BAA will help accelerate our research endeavors and provide NGA with the ability to expand and diversify its research performer base, while giving us better flexibility and agility in research contracting efforts,” said Cindy Daniell, PhD, NGA director of research.

BAAs are a general announcement of an agency’s research interest including criteria for selecting proposals and soliciting the participation of all offerors capable of satisfying the government’s needs. BAAs may be used by agencies to fulfill their requirements for scientific study and experimentation directed toward increasing knowledge or understanding, rather than focusing on a specific system or hardware solution.

Technical advances developed under the BIG-R BAA will enable the delivery of future GEOINT capabilities to users for operational impact aimed at solving challenging defense and intelligence problems.

New technology focus areas of interest in the domains of foundational GEOINT, advanced phenomenologies and analytic technologies align with the NGA Director’s Intent and the newly released NGA Tech Strategy. A COVID-19 rapid response topic will be one of the first items posted under the BIG-R BAA.

The BIG-R BAA can be found at https://beta.sam.gov, solicitation number HM0476-20-BAA-0001, or http://www.grants.gov.​

Source: NGA

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