Future directions for SCORPION STARE: 2022 Grant Recipients

Distribution: General / non-confidential

It pleases Us to announce that the following experimental research programmes will each receive £10,000,000 guaranteed and inflation adjusted anually for three years:

Two-diode imaging (Dean, Salem, Chen)

Single-pixel cameras have been an area of research for two decades, and it has been understood for even longer how to use a reverse-biased LED to measure ambient light levels. Combining the two technologies with SCORPION STARE could potentially allow 'STARE devices to be miniaturized into millimeter-scale passive devices.

Deep Stare (Wu, Angelov, Soleymani)

Technology like Deep Convolutional Networks, AGAINs, and the like have made it possible to create plausible images from archetypes. Deep Stare, if its promise can be realized, will allow remote / non-line-of-sight deployment of STARE technology against enemies of the state. All that is required is an accurate image generating model, coupled with petascale iteration, to neutralize a threat based on a description. Imagine that you can simply input "a 25-year old caucasian male insurgent stands in front of a High street shop, waiting for the right moment to unleash the demonic threads even now coiling in his belly", and before he can act, he is turned into radioactive slag.

Stereo acoustic imaging (Toth, Ben-Amram, Toth)

It will happen to one woman out of four in her lifetime: that hoped-for pregnancy converted to tragedy when her gynecologist explains that the embryo is (the wrong kind of) nonhuman. Stereo acoustic imaging promises to allow easy, outpatient treatment for our most precious resource, fertile females.

Civilian Applications

We also wish to announce funding of the following programmes to create civilian applications for SCORPION STARE technology. Each programme will receive £100,000 in the first year, with possible increase to £500,000 per year based on progress. In exchange, the Crown is awarded 27% of eventual revenues, in purpetuity.

His Majesty would like to congratulate all surviving entrants for their inventive grant proposals.

Entry first conceived on 25 June 2019, 1:39 UTC, last modified on 25 June 2019, 2:20 UTC
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