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See other news stories£3 million for explosives and weapons detection projects
10 December 2007
HOSDB is signing contracts to fund 10 innovative explosives and weapons detection research and development (R&D) projects. The projects, to be carried out by five UK universities and five technology companies, resulted from our call for proposals and conference earlier this year, and will be funded jointly by HOSDB, Department for Transport (DfT), Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in support of CONTEST requirement.
The cross-government call for proposals was intended to stimulate innovation in industry and academia by focusing scientists and engineers on real operational problems. Although HOSDB and its project partners have always conducted and supported innovative projects, many of the unsolicited proposals we receive show a lack of understanding of user requirements. Many have to be rejected because they either address the wrong requirements or reinvent the wheel. It was also felt that there may be innovators who had never considered applying their expertise to explosives and weapons detection. So HOSDB, MPS, DfT and CPNI scientists, supported by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), worked with HOSDB’s procurement team to develop a process that was fair and as open as possible while keeping control of sensitive information.The call for proposals was announced in the technical press at the end of March 2007 and in May more than 90 company and university representatives got together at the Imperial War Museum to learn about the requirements and how to put together a one-page “Quad Chart” proposal. A few weeks later some 230 Quads arrived through the Home Office internet procurement portal. A carefully planned selection process reduced this to 28 projects for which detailed proposals were requested, and finally 10 to be funded.
The final 10 include new techniques for X-ray examination, millimetre-wave imaging, explosives trace detection and human factors in screening. Altogether about £3 million has been committed over about three years.
We expect to run a similar process next summer, building on the success of what is a first for UK explosives and weapons detection research.
