A--VACE III Broad Agency Announcement

The Disruptive Technology Organization (DTO), formerly the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) is planning to solicit proposals for Phase III of the VACE (Video Analysis and Content Extraction) Program through the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) process. The DTO is a research organization that was jointly established as ARDA in December 1998 by the Department of Defense and the U.S. Intelligence Community. Its mission was to incubate revolutionary, disruptive Research and Development (R&D) activities within the broad field of Information Technology. The VACE Program focus is to conduct research that enables effective ingesting, indexing, managing, accessing and understanding a large video corpus from multiple heterogeneous sources. Those heterogeneous sources of data include Broadcast News; Meetings/Conferences; Surveillance; Ground Reconnaissance (i.e. scenes of various indoor and outdoor activities involving people, vehicles and facilities shot from handheld cameras); and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The VACE Program, is seeking proposals for innovative, creative, high-risk research to achieve significant advancements in technologies and methods for video content extraction, intelligent content services, and enabling technologies. Topics under consideration include, but are not limited to, the following: object detection, recognition, modeling and tracking; scene/object/event classification; scene modeling; mensuration; simple and complex event detection, recognition and understanding; change detection; video summarization, filtering, indexing, monitoring, browsing and content based routing; advanced query/retrieval using Q&A techniques; camera parameter estimation; image stabilization and enhancement; integrity analysis; multi-modal fusion; event ontology and expression language; and automated annotation language. The BAA is planned to encompass four calendar years, initiated the summer of 2006 and run through the summer of 2009. It will be open to all US and non-US research and development organizations including: " Large and small businesses; " Academic and eligible non-profit and not-for-profit institutions; and " Collaborative ventures from mixed sources as well as all US Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). The Department of Interior, National Business Center (NBC), Acquisition Services Division, Southwest Branch, Fort Huachuca, AZ plans to issue this solicitation on behalf of and in coordination with the DTO. The draft BAA 06-01-MT will be available on or about December 20, 2005 at the following NBC website: www.nbc.gov/solicit.html Link will be titled VACE III BAA. Public comments/questions will be accepted through January 6, 2006. These must be submitted in writing to the following email address: contact@example.gov Potential Offerors are requested to provide POC information, company name, mailing address, phone number, and email address with their questions. Answers will be posted as quickly as possible on the NBC website above. A virtual presolicitation meeting is planned for January 20, 2006. Questions which require more extensive investigation will be answered at that time. Please refer to the NBC website above for details on how to participate in the virtual conference. The anticipated release date for the final BAA is February 1, 2006. The contracting office POC is Ann Peine, contact@example.gov or phone +1 (555) 000-0000.