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Accurate and accessible records are needed to maintain accurate health histories for children, identify those who need to be immunized, and those who have missed immunizations or are off schedule. When the record is unclear, inaccessible or unused, it's harder to reach children with life-saving vaccines. The foundation will recognize the top entries - selected by a panel including Melinda Gates (co-chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Robert Fabricant (Vice President, Frog Design), Dr. Margaret Chan (Director General, World Health Organization), Tony Lake (Executive Director, UNICEF), and Dr. Walt Orenstein (Professor of Medicine, Emory University) - with awards of up to $50,000.  Top designs may be piloted in as many as ten countries by 2018. We are looking for innovative ideas that will: improve the child health record; strengthen information systems; and empower health workers and families to protect children from vaccine-preventable diseases and ultimately save lives.

The Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI), Rome Research Site, is soliciting white papers under this announcement for innovative technologies to enable the effective management of information for military operations. Focus: The objective of this BAA is to develop and demonstrate middleware to bridge the tactical and enterprise domains, realizing decentralized IM services built upon client-based protocols for use at the tactical edge that can coexist and interoperate securely with the server-based IM services that are well-suited for deployment in enterprise-scale environments. To improve the exchange of information between enterprise and the tactical edge networks and applications, these services need to be capable of operating in contested/congested environments and be built upon disruption and fault tolerant techniques and technologies. The research and development to be conducted under this BAA is focused on the following: 1) Interoperable hybrid centralized & decentralized IM services designed for mobile operations. 2) Gateways for the exchange of heterogeneous information across disparate networks. 3) Disruption tolerant information preservation, optimized delivery, and synchronization. 4) Demonstration of the utility of these capabilities in operationally relevant environments.

The BAA objective is to conceive, develop and demonstrate innovative and affordable technologies that provide network requirements of future autonomous swarm applications which will differ drastically from information exchange requirements for current applications. For example, many of the collaborative tasks defined in Part VIII-References [1] implicitly require communications to enable intra-agent collaboration in severely contested environments, something which existing military and commercial networking protocols are unable to achieve. New networking paradigms will be required before the Air Force can successfully implement future swarm-based autonomous missions. Therefore, the primary interest will be in techniques that will allow for the network-optimal use of existing point-to-point data links. This will primarily involve a combination of protocols at layer three and above, but will also include distributed beamforming techniques.