Sandia_Natl_Labs_FY19_LDRD_Annual_SAND2020-3752 R_2_S

FY19 ANNUAL REPORT

LDRD PROGRAM ACCOMPLISHMENTS The following sections highlight some of the accomplishments of Sandia’s LDRD program, organized around the three themes of mission agility, technical vitality and workforce development. Unless otherwise noted, these highlights are for projects that ended in FY19. Some of these highlights are for projects that ended prior to FY19, but whose impact is still being realized across the mission and the nation. Enabling agile responses to national security missions (technology/capability affecting the mission) It takes innovative STE to create and enhance the capabilities needed to ensure that the U.S. is ready to respond nimbly to national security mission needs. LDRD is a critical resource at the heart of what it takes to lead into the future. Using cognitive information environments for international safeguards. For the first time, a team of Sandia researchers has applied cognitive science principles to the international nuclear safeguards’ domain. The project garnered international attention at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Safeguards Research & Development Association for its sound experimental design and scientific principles, as well as its novel approach of using human performance testing to document the impacts of information visualization on safeguards inspectors working in the field. The follow- on work funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity will explore the cognitive impacts of erroneous response from machine learning models, and on

cognition-informed safeguards best practices. The findings were published in the proceedings of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management Annual Meeting, the European Safe-guards Research and Development Symposia, and the Human- Computer Interaction International Conference. A B C

Example stimuli from a human performance experiment assessing the impact of safeguards inspector note-taking methods on change-detection tasks. The use of abstract stimuli allowed the team to reduce bias based on technical expertise. (Images used with permission from the IARPA/MiCRONS project.)

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LABORATORY DIRECTED RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT