Aptima Lands Seven 'SBIR Phase II' Contracts with Department of Defense

Innovative technologies for Army and Navy address challenges in Contemporary Operating Environment

Woburn, Mass., October 27, 2007 --[ASDWire]-- Aptima, Inc., a leader in human-centered engineering, announces the award of seven Small Business Innovation Research Program (SBIR) contracts totaling $3.9 million for developing technologies to improve warfighter performance in today’s military missions.

Sponsored by the Small Business Association, SBIR is a highly competitive program that encourages small business to explore their technological potential and provides the incentive to profit from its commercialization. Aptima’s ongoing participation in the program has resulted in a track record of transitioning SBIR projects to Phase III that was recognized in 2007, with a Tibbetts Award, which recognizes the best commercialization achievements in the SBIR program.

Aptima, applying its understanding of human performance in complex sociotechnical systems, will address the challenge’s faced by America’s warfighters in today’s operating environments - biosurveillance, cultural assessment and prediction, UAV control, intelligence analysis, simulation-based training, and aviation safety – as illustrated below:

• BioSINE II:
  BioSurveillance Indicators of Notable Events will be an interactive dashboard integrating diverse data streams (intelligence, medical, sensor, open source components), providing commanders with actionable intelligence to augment situation awareness and response.
  
• CASMIRR:
  Cultural Assessment and Simulation of Military Information/Operations in Reaction and Response will provide soldiers in the field with an easy-to-use, easy-to-interpret information source that will serve as a guide to structure their interactions with the local people they may encounter.
  
• MIMIC:
  Mixed Initiative Machine for Instructed Computing will integrate psychological learning theory and rapid machine learning algorithms to enable human operators to teach UAVs new tactical and control behaviors, ultimately enabling UAVs to both infer mission threats and opportunities and to make tactical decisions and control actions.
  
• FINAL:
  Facility Identification via Networks with Adaptive Links will combine available information about physical structures used in repetitive crimes, and will use the results of its analysis to advise analysts on the most likely physical structures to be used in repetitive crimes and on high-payoff surveillance activities.
  
• ACTOR:
  Automated Collateral Tactics for OPFOR Responses will embed into wargaming simulators a more intelligent enemy that will react/adapt to what friendly forces are doing, and will enable the design of advanced collaborative planning tools to support development of courses of action.
  
• CROSSTAFF:
  Creating Requirements for Operational Safety Support Through Assessment of Flight-simulation Fidelity will provide a system to leverage safety causal factors to derive training objectives, scenario events and conditions, performance measurements, and simulator fidelity requirements.
  
• CoVE:
  Collaborative Visualization Environment will support collaboration among expert multidisciplinary analysts in long-term planning, supporting teams in generating new information of interest and providing for visual collaboration between analysts through agile information sharing technologies.  

About Aptima:
Aptima is a leader in the field of human-centered engineering, solving the problems of human performance in today’s complex sociotechnical systems. Aptima’s unique approach couples social science principles with quantitative, computational methods. The company provides products and services focused on the design of organizations, user-centered technology, and training systems. Aptima is headquartered in Woburn, MA, with offices in Washington, DC and Dayton, OH. www.aptima.com