National Institute of Standards and Technology April 2005 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The inventions listed below are jointly owned by the U.S. Government, as represented by the Department of Commerce. The Department of Commerce's interest in these inventions is available for licensing in accordance with 35 U.S.C. 207 and 37 CFR Part 404 to achieve expeditious commercialization of results of federally funded research and development.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a public meeting from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on May 13, 2005 at the NIST campus in Gaithersburg, MD. This meeting pertains to a new DHS Program to develop comprehensive standards related to the development, testing, and certification of effective technologies for Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) robotics. These US&R robotic performance standards cover sensing, mobility, navigation, planning, integration, and operator control in order to ensure that the robots can meet operational requirements under the extremely challenging conditions that rescuers are faced with, including long endurance missions. The standards will also address issues of robotic component interoperability to reduce costs. The US&R robotic standards effort focuses on fostering collaboration between first responders, robot vendors, and technology developers to advance consensus standards for task specific robot capabilities and interoperability of components. These standards will allow DHS to provide guidance to local, state, and federal homeland security entities regarding the purchase, deployment and use of US&R robotic systems. The meeting is intended as a method of disseminating information pertaining to this newly initiated program. Attendees at the May 13 forum are expected to include: robot platform vendors, robot peripherals and software providers, sensor (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, environmental) providers, researchers working on robotic components, platforms, and algorithms, government agencies working on applicable robotic technologies and sensors, federal, state, and local responders and response agencies, and testing and evaluation sites and laboratories. There will be an $80 charge for this meeting and pre-registration is required. An electronic registration site will be available at https://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/ US&RRobotStandards.

The Secretary of Commerce has approved Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) Publication 201, Standard for Personal Identity Verification of Federal Employees and Contractors, and has made it compulsory and binding on Federal agencies for use in issuing a secure and reliable form of personal identification to employees and contractors. The standard does not apply to personal identification associated with national security systems as defined by 44 U.S.C. 3542(b)(2). Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12, Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors, dated August 27, 2004, directed the Secretary of Commerce to promulgate, by February 27, 2005, a Government-wide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification to be issued by the Federal Government to its employees and contractors (including contractor employees). HSPD-12 specified that the secure and reliable forms of identification to be issued to employees and contractors should be based on: sound criteria for verifying an individual employee's identity; strong resistance to identity fraud, tampering, and terrorist exploitation; capability of being rapidly authenticated electronically; and issuance by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process. FIPS 201 was developed to satisfy the technical, administrative, and timeliness requirements of HSPD 12. The standard was developed in a ``manner consistent with the Constitution and applicable laws, including the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. 552a) and other statutes protecting the rights of Americans'' as required in HSPD 12. In developing the standard, NIST used technical input solicited from industry and government participants in workshops and public meetings, and from a Federal Register notice (69 FR 68128) of November 23, 2004, inviting comments from industry and government on the draft standard.

In accordance with the provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be conducting research on voting equipment used in the 2004 elections. The NIST research is designed to: (1) Determine the realistic usability benchmarks for current voting system technology to support usability performance standards in next generation voluntary voting systems standards, and (2) develop usability test protocols for conformance testing of such standards. NIST may also examine relevant instructions, documentation and error messages, without doing any direct usability studies thereon. Manufacturers interested in participating in this research will be asked to execute a Letter of Understanding. Interested parties are invited to contact NIST for information regarding participation, Letters of Understanding and shipping.