Ashburn firm wins Dept. of Homeland Security award

Ashburn-based tech company Cignal LLC announced Thursday it has won a Phase 1 award from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate to develop technologies for X-ray inspection systems using artificial intelligence models. 

The award amount from the department’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program was not disclosed.

“We are proud to be working with DHS S&T on this very important project,” Cignal CEO Jaclyn Fiterman said in a statement. “SVIP’s innovative startup engagement model will allow Cignal to further expand the capabilities and applications of Cignal Workbench and deliver an advanced homeland security solution that provides seamless, unsupervised AI model training on a billion baggage images — a feat impossible today.”

Cignal develops technology for advanced inspection and and security systems, and during the project will use its training workflow product, Cignal Workbench, to generate high-fidelity synthetic volumetric data. High-fidelity data is data that has been reproduced with little distortion from the original. 

The data will be used for computed tomography applications and advanced technology X-ray inspection systems. After the project is complete, there will be an unlimited source of labeled training data which can be used for training of advanced artificial intelligence models. AI models rely on large amounts of training data to learn. Cignal’s work on the project eliminates labor-intensive manual labeling.

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