U.S. Navy Civilian Service Meritorious Medal awarded to Panama City scientist

U.S. Navy Civilian Service Meritorious Medal awarded to Panama City scientist

By Cierra Burch, NSWC PCD Public Affairs

Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division's (NSWC PCD) workforce directly contributes to the research and development of cutting-edge technologies and tools to increase the warfighter's efficiency and effectiveness of the Navy readiness. One specific contribution led to an NSWC PCD scientist being awarded the Department of the Navy Civilian Service Meritorious Award (DoN CSMA).

Dr. Isaac Sledge, senior machine learning research scientist, is awarded the CSMA for his work yielding unprecedented results in automatic target recognition (ATR) applications.

"Deep learning solutions for machine intelligence have gained tremendous popularity over the past decade due to their effectiveness and unparalleled accuracy; however, until recently, such a high level of machine intelligence could only be achieved through massive curated and annotated datasets," said Dr. Darshan Bryner, Advance Processing Branch head. "Dr. Sledge's recent work on weakly-supervised, low-shot, deep learning has reduced the required dataset size, annotation labor, and computation time by several orders of magnitude without sacrificing any model accuracy."

This research has demonstrated immense promise for creating next-generation, target-analysis models that will significantly reduce manual-annotation requirements.

"This research is only a steppingstone to our broader objectives," said Sledge. "We are now focusing on creating systems that can provide collaborative technologies to better support the warfighter."

"Our number one goal is supporting the warfighter and meeting their needs, current and future," said NSWC PCD Commanding Officer, Capt. David Back. "Dr. Sledge's findings in automatic target recognition have set forth a path for us to directly support the fleet in present time while providing an avenue for future capabilities and technologies."

The DoN MCSA is the third-highest honorary award in the Navy and is granted for meritorious civilian service or a high value contribution that greatly benefits the Navy. It recognizes achievements that have sweeping, command-wide impact.

"I was immensely humbled and incredibly surprised when I found out my supervisor, Dr. Bryner, was recommending me for this award. It was also a huge honor to receive the award as it means a lot to, not only myself, but by members of my team, the entire warfare center, and my program sponsors who supported the work. It is recognition for years of cutting-edge research that is finally starting to generate a high amount of impact for the warfighter," said Sledge.