Research and Development (R&D)

Woman at computer doing research in a lab

Internally Sponsored Program|
Our Research in Practice|
Impacts & Insights

Transforming Innovation into Practical and Sustainable Solutions by Advancing the State-of-the-Art

Government agencies face complex and dynamic challenges as they serve crucial missions on behalf of the American people. At Noblis, applying innovative thinking and inventions to these challenges is an integral part of how we serve our federal customers and their missions. We transform new and novel ideas and inventions into practical, sustainable solutions that increase mission performance and efficiency.

Innovation is a practice focus for all Noblis staff—whether working on customer-funded problems, advancing science and technology through our internally-funded Noblis Sponsored Research program or improving the shared services that support our staff.

Noblis Internally Sponsored Research Program

The Noblis Sponsored Research (NSR) program is driven by government missions and fuels solutions to our Nation’s most critical challenges. It is an essential part of corporate life at Noblis. Our yearly investment in this program, along with our ethical practices, is part of what makes us a unique nonprofit organization. Noblis research generates sound, sustainable solutions with enduring impacts.

Our NSR projects demonstrate the art of the possible to our customers. Our research enables us to create new intellectual capital and capabilities and to develop new models that will help us solve the critical problems our Nation faces now and into the future. Noblis research allows us to expand staff capabilities and provides a rewarding outlet for the inventive spirit found throughout the company.

To foster this spirit of collaboration and facilitate continued improvement of this program, we introduced a web-based tool available to all members of the Noblis community where teams can exchange ideas with peers across the company to solve customer challenges. Through this ideation process, each year we invite all staff to participate in proposing new projects that will be considered for corporate funding in topic area of corporate interest such as:

Artificial intelligence and machine learning
Autonomous systems
Big data, predictive and prescriptive analytics
Bioinformatics
Cloud, mobile computing and IoT
Cybersecurity and operations
and more…

Our Research in Practice

The following examples are just a few of the Noblis innovations fueled by our research. These accomplishments represent advancements in science and technology, and more importantly they directly contribute to our cutomers’ mission performance.

IMPROVING READINESS WITH ADVANCED MODELING AND SIMULATION

Noblis MSD developed a solution called OptiSourceTM that provides strategic schedule modeling of drydocking and other maintenance periods for surface ship fleet—which includes approximately 160-200 ships and 600-800 dockings—looking out over a 30-year period. It provides maintenance availability and drydock optimization capabilities and tools which include decision support. Learn more at noblis.org/optisource/.

DNA SEQUENCING IN THE FIELD

Rapid, accurate biological threat identification is critical for making informed decisions that protect our nation. DNA sequencing – the process of “reading” a sample’s genetic blueprint – is the integral first step in organism identification which has widespread applications in biosurveillance. A Noblis team of biologists and engineers conceptualized an integrated, self-contained system that is a field-portable DNA sequencing solution. Learn more at noblis.org/dnasequencing/.

ORCHESTRATED AUTONOMY: INTEROPERABILITY OF CONNECTED VEHICLES

The Noblis orchestrated autonomy concept and research orchestrates the actions of unfamiliar, connected and autonomous machines. It enables nearby connected machines to share situational awareness of obstacles and threats projected over time and to collectively plan motion paths and other actions that avoid collisions or conflicts. The award-winning concept enables systems of autonomous machines to operate safer, more productively and more equitably. Learn more about our autonomous systems capabilities at noblis.org/autonomy.

BIOMETRICS AND IDENTITY INTELLIGENCE: LARGE SCALE FACIAL RECOGNITION

Noblis invented methods and solutions to match a single facial image against a 100 million-image database in one second. Our graphical analytics capabilities produced large social networks of facial image relationships from a large-scale set of photographs with multiple facial images. Our research was initiated in response to challenges such as the post-Boston marathon bombing investigation.

DATA ANALYTICS AND BIOINFORMATICS: KEEPING FOOD PATHOGEN FREE

Noblis enhanced national food safety by delivering high-quality bioinformatics capabilities to the food industry, which demonstrated an immediate, high impact use-case for bioinformatics to keep food pathogen free. Noblis applied its high performance computing expertise, data hosting infrastructure and genomic analysis solution, BioVelocity, to meet this critical public health safety challenge.

R&D PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: MAXIMIZING VALUE AND REDUCING COST

Noblis is a leading provider of acquisition and R&D portfolio management for the federal government. Our RunGrants solution addresses these specialized requirements. Agencies can streamline workflows and transform the way they manage projects from inception to completion with this secure cloud-based solution.