Industry Day_Main Q and A.pdf

Industry Day Question and Answer Session: Main

Q: Do you use AI in our digital Histology pathology for the slide readings?

A: There is some. It is very little but they want a lot more.

Q: Are the staff the same for the veterinary care and the exposures?

A: No, but we all work together.

Q: How many people on the veterinarian side and on the exposure side?

A: On the veterinary side, I think we have 19, but there are active duty, contractors, and civilians. And on the exposure side, it depends on the particular experiment, so it varies.

Q: What are the ages of the animals?

A: Based on protocol.

Q: Does the contractor provide the animals?

A: Yes.

Q: Will there be multiple primes? Do primes do everything?

A: Prime does work and outsources.

Q: Regarding histology services, do we partner with other organizations?

A: No, unless we are collaborating. There is no work for pay.

Q: Just to clarify about the structure of the of the contract. Does the M in MMA allow for you to do multiple awards?

A: Yes. We are looking for the best approach and that includes subcontracts or teaming.

Q: Relating to that point, were you referring to RHDR like Birdie? How many awards were there? Did you get multiple proposals?

A: Yes (like Birdie). That resulted in one award. (From Birdie) we got 13 white papers and of those we selected 5.

Q: Do you ever use human tissue surrogates in your laser bioeffects testing?

A: Yes

Q: The current effort was $58M, plus there was an add work that was put on that was a one-time thing. What are you anticipating as the overall effort or maybe an average value per year?

A: The estimated ROM will be on the solicitation but yes it will be in that neighborhood.

Q: What platforms and technology do you use for VR simulations in wargaming?

A: For VR- Unity. For Wargaming- we are developing plug-ins led by the Lifecycle Management center (AFSIMS)

Q: In addition to developing plug-ins, have you been conducting wargames?

A: We participated in the (DEUCE) DEUCE event. Our role in that was to simulate laser dazzle with C-130 pilots.

Q: Is there a reason why the 50 kW laser was in the faraday(??) cage?

A: It was a space identified and used to modify because of the was a function of control and location of the system

Q: Do you foresee the mission moving more towards any type of medical applications or is that still outside of your lane in terms of human use?

A: It’s outside our core mission. But we have pretty significant, capabilities. NAMRU San Antonio or the 59th medical wing or one of the medical research organizations will partner with us to do something, so that's how we kind of work in the in the medical realm. It gets complicated from a logistics perspective and with funding.

Q: Can anyone speak to what's going on with augmented reality (AR)?

A: Most of the focus has been in virtual reality (VR) so far and most of the development has been in VR. AR has been a bit more challenging- simulating after images from either laser flash or broadband or nuclear flash and that would be imposed over the real environment, is one of the directions we are looking to go.

Q: Do you all develop those scenes yourself or do you adapt existing ones or contract out?

A: It depends upon the environment.

Q: Is there any anticipated funding for laser power beaming research and the reflective effects of those technologies?

A: For any system that is going to be put out there for the DoD to use, the questions for us are often what are the potential bio effects and what's going to be the risk in employing the system.

Q: Where do you see kind of your top three “wavelengths of interest” that are in this next contract?

A: One micron is always going to be popular, like 50 kilowatt is a Micron. Those are the typical wavelengths that are in existing prototypes that are being deployed. Often, we'll look at the road maps that you see from the Joint Direct Energy Transition Office that shows what kind of technologies are out there and what kind of things are being looked at. We will be following along to look at that. There's a variety of technologies on either side of the wavelengths that are being used, as those are higher powers for beacon illuminators and target illuminators. Will be looking and have been looking at those kind of wavelengths.

Q: So in the RFP it mentioned a number of like analytic and visualization tools that you use or that are common around here, what about any codes that are designed for the high performance computers the DoD systems? Do you use or make use of any like open source packages to do any of your modeling?

A: Yes, it's a variety of things are available to us of course through that high performance computing system. We have codes that were generated in House. We have been exploring other tools that come from the national labs. We have looked at MOOSE recently, which is a kind of internal to the DoD and DOE largely for multi physics application, as well as, COMSOL. I would pose to the group that if you have a deep knowledge of a given tool that can solve a problem that's probably within the realm of possibility.

Q: As you guys are writing codes, is there any requirements coming down either from AFRL or above to require them to be memory safe by default?

A: Yes, we are starting to see that. Most of the components that are being written here are C++ codes that are integrated into environments like AFSIM. If you have capabilities in that area, it may be desirable more and more.

Q: You have a lot of ultra-fast systems. Are you exploring bioeffects caused by filamentation or nonlinear propagation?

A: We’ve published the work in that area, so, yes. We've just published a paper looking at super continuum generation and propagation in the eye that'll be in Journal of Laser Applications this month. So if you're interested in looking at non-linear optics types of experiments we're doing, we encourage you to look in the journal.

Q: For the AR/VR simulations are you all currently using AFSIM or UNITY?

A: The VR portion of it is UNITY but it does integrate into AFSIM.

Q: So, we saw in a lot of the labs a lot of the custom equipment that you have or you have to build custom capabilities. A lot of them also were tied to what looked like custom computer equipment too. Is there a requirement on the contract to be able to do any of the maintenance or configuration of the computer system to go with the equipment?

A: There's a blend to that answer. We typically get some level of warranty for some period of time. To give the contractor the answer to that is, it's the contractor's property until the end item is delivered and then it becomes government package property, unless stated different in the SOW.

Q: A contract question, if I heard this right, you said it's not a FAR-15 acquisition?

A: It’s an order off of CHEERS so we will follow what the BAA says.

Q: In the RFP, there's a section or discussion of things that you generate, be it made some data or products that may be put in or contribute to scientific engineering databases but it didn't really talk about well. What was the context around that? What are these scientific engineering databases that products or materials being contributed?

A: Within the digital laboratory environment, most of the products that we build there is a version of it, a copy. The built library, the source code, those kinds of collections are held on digital laboratory environment so that we could cooperate with partners. We have efforts here to record and archive data so it’s available in the future and we maintain things like a database. So, we organize data, keeping it structured in a way that can be used for either future products or our collaborators to access.