PNNL

National laboratory expertise was on display at the 2024 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation (RDT&E) Summit. Hosted by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate's Office of National Laboratories, the summit put the spotlight on how DHS and Department of Energy national laboratories are delivering RDT&E capabilities for security challenges.

The annual event provides DHS components, like Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration, an opportunity to learn about national laboratory capabilities and to foster collaboration across organizations for the benefit of security.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) presentations spanned the science and technology realm and included the following:

• Curtis Larimer presented “Disrupting Transnational Criminal Supply Chains using Advanced Threat Pattern Analysis,” highlighting new data analysis capabilities to understand and identify chemical and equipment procurement supply chains by searching for threat patterns in large-scale commercial, public, and government data streams.
• James Koch’s presentation, “Scientific Machine Learning for Remote Sensing,” showcased developments in leveraging domain knowledge (i.e., known physical relationships) to craft novel machine learning architectures for different tasks in the remote sensing data processing pipeline, a technique that may benefit chemical threat monitoring and detection of biological materials.
• Becky Hess presented “Threat-Agnostic Sensing using Biomimetic Device,” sharing PNNL-developed biomimetic organic electronic devices for characterizing host–pathogen and host–toxin interactions—an achievement that is addressing the need for simple, fast, and robust toxin activity and pathogen detection assays.
• Jennifer Mobberley shared “Detection of Enzymatic Activity in Environmental Samples using Commercial Off-the-Shelf Nanopore Sequencing-Based Instruments,” showcasing a detection platform under development that can provide methods to assay enzymes of concern for defense, law enforcement, public health, and first responders.
• Rachel Wofford’s presentation, “Reinforcement Learning for Environmentally Driven Adversarial Attacks,” highlighted an adversarial attack and counter-AI framework that allows users to experiment with the resilience of AI-enabled speech-based virtual assistants in multiple predefined experimental scenarios. 

PNNL’s Ryan Eddy and Kristin Omberg also attended and hosted a poster highlighting PNNL’s overall homeland security sector capabilities, partnerships, and impacts.

“National laboratories, including PNNL, represent a comprehensive research system filled with great talent, capabilities, and facilities. This workshop was a welcome opportunity for us to get together and showcase the great strides we’re making in bringing innovation and partnerships to address homeland security challenges,” said Eddy, director of PNNL homeland security programs.