FINAL_JOFOC_Steller_Sea_Lion_Count_Program_Redacted.pdf

Version 1.0

Source Selection Information – see FAR 2.101 and 3.104

SOLE SOURCE JUSTIFICATION

FOR AN ACTION EXCEEDING THE SIMPLIFIED ACQUISITION THRESHOLD

USING SIMPLIFIED PROCEDURES FOR CERTAIN COMMERCIAL ITEMS

AUTHORITY: FAR 13.501(a)

NFFS7300-19-02248 Steller Sea Lion Count Program

1. Agency and contracting activity.

Department of Commerce, NOAA Acquisition and Grants Office (AGO), Western Acquisition Division (WAD), and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) Marine Mammal Laboratory (MML) located in Seattle, WA.

2. Nature and/or description of the action being approved.

This is a sole source justification for a new requirement. The planned contract type will be firm-fixed price. The Government intends to solicit a proposal from Kitware, Inc.

3. Description of supplies or services required to meet the agency’s needs (including the total estimated value).

NMFS, AFSC, MML requires a contractor to develop a Steller sea lion Count Program. The program capabilities shall include image processing to eliminate errors from double counting sea lions from overlapping images and target detection by age-sex class. MML has aerial imagery, raw and counted (sea lions annotated with dots, known counts for each image) from aerial surveys conducted between 2007 and 2019 that will be used for creating, training, and refining the Steller sea lion Count Program. The general steps for developing such a program can involve working from MML’s pre-existing Kaggle (an online community of data scientists and machine learners, which allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges) algorithms or the contractor developing their own algorithms, performing necessary annotations from MML counted images, error checking and further refinement to improve accuracy of target detection, and exporting final results in a usable format for MML. The program must be user friendly for non-computer scientists.

The estimated overall value of this requirement is . The period of performance will include a base period from the date of award – September 30, 2020 and one, one-year option period from October 1, 2020 – September 30, 2021.

4. Statutory authority permitting the sole source (including brand name) acquisition.

X 41 U.S.C. 1901, using SAP up to $7M as authorized by FAR 13.500(a) and implemented by FAR 13.501(a).

5. Demonstration that the proposed contractor’s unique qualifications or the nature of the acquisition requires use of the authority cited.

The contracting officer has determined the following circumstances justify the use of a sole source as supported below:

NFFS7400-19-00786 Life Tech Genetics Consumables

Source Selection Information – see FAR 2.101 and 3.104

Only one source – Only one source is capable of providing the supplies or services required at the level of quality required because the supplies or services are unique or highly specialized.

Through Kaggle and working with computer scientists in academia, this project has been justified as feasible in its preliminary efforts. Additionally, Video and Image Analytics for a Marine Environment (VIAME) was developed in coordination between NOAA and Kitware as infrastructure or framework of an interface for integrating Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) learning algorithms. While this is an open-source package intended to be used by the public, it has proven to be difficult to use the package by non-experts to develop their own workflows. No other vendors have demonstrated the capability to create a program under these parameters without partnering directly with Kitware. At this stage,non-experts cannot easily and efficiently develop workflows without a large investment of time and development best done by those with computer science backgrounds. The sort of work that needs to be done to develop a workflow using VIAME (like a Steller sea lion count program) requires further steps and refinement to create a final robust count program that can be fully utilized to complete NOAA Fisheries’ mission to the level of accuracy required within a reasonable amount of time and cost. Kitware is the only vendor that has the ability to take these steps within the current framework.

Review of the responses to the Protech Request for Information and Sources Sought notice posted to the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website, provides clear supporting evidence that the only source that can do this work is Kitware, which developed VIAME and has the necessary expertise to meet the requirement. Kitware’s core areas of expertise are computer vision, data and analytics, high-performance computing and visualization, medical computing, and software process. They have extensive experience with developing algorithms and software for automated image analysis, including image processing and target detection.

They are well versed in the challenges of target detection and enumeration from visual imagery. Kitware developed the VIAME package and therefore have the expertise to further develop/refine VIAME for the current project needs. Kitware builds on theirs and other open source platforms to develop tailored solutions to help customers effectively leverage open source platforms developed by them and others that are applicable. They have direct experience working with detecting wildlife, including pinnipeds such as ice seals and otariid species in California. Kitware is the only vendor with the current capability to immediately create a program that is compatible with current system functions.

Should NOAA be unable to contract with Kiware, the traditional method for processing will be the only available option, which is time consuming and costly, and diverts resources from other mission-related activities.

6. Description of efforts made to ensure that offers are solicited from as many potential sources as practicable, including whether a notice was or will be publicized as required by FAR Subpart 5.2 and, if not, which exception under FAR 5.202 applies.

In accordance with the posting requirements in FAR 5.2, upon award, a notice will be transmitted to the Government-wide point of entry at the Federal Business Opportunities website. A redacted JOFOC will be included with this notice.