January 2022
Featured Article
What is an effective strategy for crafting winning large proposals?
By: Srinivas Tadigadapa, Northeastern University
The ability to compete for and win large multi-year grants from NSF and other agencies is a high priority for ECE Departments. A strategy that has been highly effective is to take the dual top down and bottom-up approach based on the 3-plane chart strategy that NSF advocates for its ERC programs. Furthermore, planning these well ahead of time and having the relevant team players and external collaborators in place is almost as necessary as having a grand vision. Having support from the University’s upper administration through extensive grant writing team and review support is vital. At Northeastern we have had some success in this arena having won an ERC grant along with an NSF INCLUDES Alliance grant and several major Center of Excellence grants from NIEHS and DHS. What follows is a description of a newly awarded Center of Excellence grant from DHS – the three paragraphs below clearly show how the vision was developed using the 3-plane chart strategy of starting in the topmost plane with a high-level vision and challenge to address, the second plane focusing on the development and engineering of necessary technologies, tools, and expertise needed to achieve this vision, and finally asking what fundamental science needs to be researched as the foundation of the entire program. In interdisciplinary programs this gets quite challenging as projects can span vast subject matter and requires teams with complementary expertise to be brought together.
Northeastern University (NU) has just launched a new $36M, 10-year Center of Excellence (COE) entitled Soft-target Engineering to Neutralize the Threat RealitY (SENTRY) funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This center will address the challenge of developing engineering solutions to help protect a wide range of soft targets and crowded places (STCPs). The scope of this challenge is vast: there are hundreds of thousands of STCPs in the U.S., accessed by tens of millions of people each day. Because of the volume and variability of STCPs, there are frequently limited security or protective measures and limited resources to enhance those measures. Three recent changes that have augmented these challenges: a more diverse set of actors and motivations, communication advances that have compressed the timeline to detect and prevent violence, and greater access to a range of weapons. Compounding these technical challenges, STCPs frequently straddle the public-private domain, and there are insufficient Homeland Security professionals with the training needed to address these challenges as they presently exist and evolve over time.
The SENTRY vision (see Figure) to address these challenges is a suite of systems called Virtual Sentries (VSs). Versatile, scalable and cost-effective, VSs will function semi-autonomously with the capability to rapidly integrate and process data to provide real-time decision support to STCP decision makers (e.g., school principals or the heads of light rail operations) as they interact with first responders to detect, deter and mitigate targeted violence.
Integrated SENTRY strategy for research, transition and workforce development, anchored by the Virtual Sentry vision. Open source enables external and in-kind contributions.
The SENTRY Team combines the strengths of three emeritus DHS COEs: ALERT, CCICADA and CREATE. ALERT (led by NU) brings a strong track record of threat anomaly detection using advanced sensor technologies and signature analysis algorithms. CCICADA (led by Rutgers) has pioneered in the protection of STCPs such as stadiums and the surface transportation infrastructure. CREATE (led by the U. of Southern California, USC) has developed optimal methods of assessing risks due to unanticipated attacks on soft target venues. All three emeritus COEs have affected meaningful transition to the field with significant impacts on workforce development and first responder training. Other SENTRY academic partners include Boston U. (BU), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Tufts U., U. of Notre Dame (ND), U. of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez (UPRM, a Minority-Serving Institution), U. of Rhode Island (URI), U. Florida and the State U. of New York-Buffalo (UB).
We are happy to share our experiences with anyone who may be interested in pursuing these and may contact Srinivas Tadigadapa, Chair ECE Northeastern University (srinivas@northeastern.edu) or SENTRY PI Michael Silevitch (m.silevitch@northeastern.edu).
