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INTRODUCTION 1 INTRODUCTION The Sensing and Positioning Technology Workshop of the Committee on Nanotechnology for the Intelligence Community was organized by the staff at the National Materials Advisory Board (NMAB) of the National Research Council (NRC) and was conducted under the intelligence community's Nano-Enabled Technology Initiative (NETI), administered by the staff of the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC). The committee was formed to assist the intelligence community in illustrating the potential for nanotechnology to address key intelligence community needs.1 Nanotechnology offers the potential to produce power, sensing, and locating devices that are small, robust, and cost-effective. This report summarizes the second of two workshops called for in the statement of task, including the presentations made to the committee and the subsequent discussion. As such, it follows the interests and knowledge of the presenters and does not necessarily provide a comprehensive analysis of the topics discussed. While some speakers did have expertise in nanotechnology, they were chosen primarily for their knowledge of tagging, sensing, and tracking applications of interest to the intelligence community. Like the report of the first workshop,2 it is being issued as an interim report written by an appointed rapporteur who attended the workshop; it was reviewed for accuracy according to standard NRC procedures prior to release. The third and final report will be a full consensus study by the committee and will contain the committee's findings and recommendations. In its final report, the committee will elaborate on the specific role nanotechnology can play in enhancing these applications. For the purposes of this workshop, the committee chose not to draw a bright line between micro-and nanoscale devices, believing that a promising new opportunity should not be excluded from discussion just because strictly speaking it might be microscale instead of nanoscale. This summary report, together with the summary of the earlier workshop on power systems, will provide useful input to the final report. The external data-gathering portion of the workshop was organized in six topic areas, with several speakers addressing each topic: 1. Security technologies overview 2. Systems 3. Natural chem/bio tags 4. Passive chem/bio tags 5. Radio/radar/optical tags 1See Appendix A for details on the workshop, Appendix B for biographies of committee members, Appendix C for definitions of acronyms, and Appendix D for the statement of task. 2National Research Council, Summary of the Power Systems Workshop on Nanotechnology for the Intelligence Community, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 2004.
INTRODUCTION 2 Following the presentations for each topic, there was a brief discussion involving all of the speakers on that topic. The workshop summary follows this same organizational scheme: For each topic area, the main points of each speaker's presentation are highlighted, followed by a recapitulation of the general discussion.
