Cooperative Agreement 95332423T0002

This Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (CFDA 16.813 - NICS Act Record Improvement Program) provides $1,283,165 to the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) to enhance the completeness, accuracy, and automation of criminal justice records reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The key goals are to ensure the state's message switch is converted to the NIEM/XML format to be compatible with the FBI CJIS Division,...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) program (CFDA 47.084) supports research to develop novel approaches for enabling participatory privacy protections for AI training data. The $120,511 award to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA will engage a multi-disciplinary team to conduct ethnographic and computational research. The key objectives are to: (1) identify socio-technical decision points and...

The National Institute of Justice awarded a $640,358 Project Grant under the Forensics Training and Technical Assistance Program (CFDA 16.044) to PI Richard Green at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The project aims to develop a laboratory procedure and software program to provide age estimation of an individual from DNA fragment features in single, rootless hair samples. Key activities include collecting DNA samples from 200 volunteers, processing 100 of these for DNA extraction and...

The Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency (PCCD) received a $419,752 Cooperative Agreement award from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics under the NICS Act Record Improvement Program (CFDA 16.813). The award will fund three overtime projects with the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP): 1) Entering mental health records into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) to increase record availability; 2) Converting a backlog of paper Record of Sale...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award of $225,000 to Michigan State University aims to develop a user-centered platform for digital content integrity. The project, titled "Collaborative Research: REDDDOT Phase 2: A User-Centered Platform for Digital Content Integrity," seeks to protect the integrity of digital content and maintain public trust in the face of threats posed by advanced generative AI...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award for $274,988 to Oblivious Labs Inc. will develop the ENCORE oblivious computation framework to enable privacy-preserving computation on sensitive data. The project aims to create fast, easy-to-use techniques for obfuscating access patterns to private data, which can reveal user intentions in applications like contact discovery and database searches. The team will build on their prior...

This Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice under the Forensics Training and Technical Assistance Program (CFDA 16.044) will support a research study by North Carolina State University to assess the performance of droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) for DNA quantification in forensic science applications. The $422,235 award will fund side-by-side experiments comparing ddPCR and traditional quantitative PCR (qPCR) methods to evaluate sensitivity, accuracy, and inhibitor tolerance...

The City and County of Denver - Police Department (DPD) was awarded a $424,068 Formula Grant from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance under the DNA Backlog Reduction Program (CFDA 16.741). The grant will support the DPD Crime Laboratory's Forensic Biology and DNA (FBIO-DNA) Unit by funding: 1) Overtime for forensic scientists to conduct DNA casework, and continuing employment of two forensic scientists and one subcontractor; and 2) Continuing employment of a...

This Project Grant award of $237,951 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Federal Grant Program supports the development of methods to safely and securely make sensitive biomedical data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) through the creation of privacy-preserving synthetic data replicas. The project aims to address the issue of "dark data" that hinders the use of AI in healthcare by empowering...

This $980,527 federal Project Grant award from the National Institute of Justice (CFDA 16.560 - National Institute of Justice Research, Evaluation, and Development Project Grants) aims to enhance and expand the HirisPlex-S (HPS) forensic DNA phenotyping tool for predicting an individual's physical appearance traits such as eye, hair, and skin color. The key objectives are to: 1) develop quantitative prediction models to complement the existing HPS web-based tool, 2) utilize deep learning to...