The National Security Agency has awarded five-year contracts to six multidisciplinary laboratories at U.S. research institutions to support security research efforts and transition ideas to real-world application.

NSA said Wednesday the awardees are small laboratories located at the Carnegie-Mellon University, International Computer Science Institute, North Carolina State University, University of Illinois-Champaign, Vanderbilt University and University of Kansas.

The lablets are part of the agency’s Science of Security and Privacy Initiative and the agency selected them after a competitive solicitation of proposals from approximately 300 universities nationwide.

Selection criteria include the scientific process of research projects; applicability to modern challenges; and capacity to expand a scientific community in the security and privacy areas.

Lablets will kick off 20 research projects that encompass challenges in cyber-physical systems, policy-governed secure collaboration, cybersecurity metrics, scalability and composability, resilient architecture, privacy and understanding and accounting for human behavior.

NSA launched its SoS Initiative in 2012 to promote security and privacy science as a research field and encourage researchers to develop new methodologies.