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Posts Tagged ‘DOD’

Or, as Danger Room puts it, DARPA wants a C-3PO. DARPA’s Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program doesn’t necessarily seek a shiny gold humanoid, but it does ask for a ‘bot capable of both human-machine interaction and of enabling human-human interaction by acting as an intermediary interpreter.

The machine is also expected to be “genre-independent,” meaning it can translate language regardless of medium, be it causally spoken words, text messaging, email, etc. But its C-3PO-like qualities wouldn’t end there. What separates BOLT from handheld translators that have been tried before is the introduction of visual and tactile inputs that would “give them the ability to hypothesize and perform automated reasoning in the acquired language.”

As a benchmark for that kind of ability, DARPA wants would-be BOLT submissions to demonstrate the ability to recognize 250 objects and “understand the consequences (pre-state and post-state) of 100 actions so that it can execute complex commands with 90% completion rate.”

Basically DARPA doesn’t just want a translator, but a useful robotic assistant that doesn’t just take verbal cues but also accounts for visual and tactile stimuli as well. Such a robot wouldn’t just serve as a battlefield translator, but also a parser of complex information streams (like intel dumps gathered from a hard-drive or off the Web) in different languages and dialects.

Besides, who else on the battlefield can quickly figure the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field?

[FedBizOpps via Danger Room]

Or--to borrow Danger Room's metaphor--DARPA wants a “track changes” feature for genomes like the one that tracks edits in a Word document, a technology that will record and report any modification to a genome. They call it Chronicle of Lineage Indicative of Origins, or CLIO. We’re calling it ambitious.

First of all, why? DARPA ostensibly wants such a technology to protect intellectual property. Genomes (and specific genes) are now bio-commodities, and patented microbes and the genes therein are the property of those who create them. A tool like CLIO would help protect patented genes from misuse as well as to help competitors prove that they are not infringing on another lab’s IP. DARPA also wants CLIO to devise a way to encrypt a genome so it can’t be stolen by rival researchers or (and now perhaps we get to the heart of the DoD’s interest) rival states.

The more important question is: how? DARPA offers the usual vague suggestions, like “possibly utilizing a cryptographical or complex mathematical approach.” Complex doesn’t sound like the half of it. Then again, it’s DARPA’s function to propose seemingly-impossible problems like this. As the personal genomics revolution presses forward, we all someday might not only have copies of our entire genomes, but we may have them password-protected as well.

[Danger Room]

In free democracies (in theory, anyhow), the government is only supposed to withhold information deemed sensitive enough to be a threat to the nation’s security or overall well-being. But bureaucracies have a tendency to grow and accrue, leaving huge offices of the state with reams upon reams of information – so much that they have no clue what a lot of it is.

DARPA is seeking a technological solution to this problem of policy by developing some means of sorting through the mess automatically to find information that is ready to see the light of day. From DARPA’s solicitation: “Improving the capability of departments and agencies to identify still-sensitive information and to make declassified information available to the public are integral parts of the classification system."

How do you do that? Well, semantically it’s possible to comb through data – at least the stuff that’s been digitized to some degree – searching for keywords that suggest a document is ready for public view. But to fully automate the process, you need something more: a subjective review of the topic to ensure that through the right (or wrong) combination of keywords or phrasing that something labeled “For Your Eyes Only” doesn’t turn up in Google searches.

That sort of value weighing and subjective decision-making requires something more, and that seems to be what DARPA is angling for. There’s no telling what the DoD’s eventual solution might look like, but we’ll keep you posted – that is, if the Pentagon makes the information publicly available.

[FedBizOpps via Danger Room]

DARPA’s Quantum Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program aims to take high-performance atomic clocks like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s NIST-F1, the massive room-sized clock housed in a lab in Boulder, Colo. Doing so won’t be any easier than many other challenges DARPA brings to the table, but the agency thinks advances in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) resonators and nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds that exhibit single-atom-like properties could create a close analog to an atomic clock in a miniature, portable package.

Atomic clocks don’t lose seconds or even fractions of seconds over time (well, that’s not entirely true, but time lost is negligible; NIST-F1 will neither gain nor lose a second in 60 million years), and that opens up major possibilities for syncronisity. Such portable clocks would allow for communications systems that are far more secure less susceptible to jamming and GPS positioning that is unrivaled. DARPA also thinks they might lead to precision sensors unrivaled in resolution and sensitivity.

[Network World, FedBizOpps]

To quote DARPA’s request for industry solicitations: “The goal of CINDER will be to greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks.”

The philosophy driving CINDER is the idea that singular actions by an insider with malicious intent aren’t noticeable as malicious – say, the downloading of a sensitive document from a DoD server or the searching for information on a particular topic. But the larger adversary mission should be noticeable when compared to normal mission activities. By monitoring strings of actions rather than isolated events, CINDER is expected to pinpoint system users who may be up to something malicious.

CINDER assumes that insiders are operating within the Pentagon’s most sensitive networks, so rather than focus on keeping outside threats out, it will be designed to weed out those already inside. As Danger Room points out, it seems like a recipe for false positives, but DARPA seems to think a properly-designed CINDER will be able to distinguish between normal and malicious mission contexts.

We’ll see. In the meantime, while DARPA works CINDER into serviceable shape, the DoD is expected to roll out a new cyber strategy by year’s end to hopefully curtail the kinds of massive leaks and cyber breaches that have been the embarrassment of the Pentagon lately.

[FedBizOpps via Danger Room]

Take, for instance, the agency's two newest initiatives: Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature, and Robustness of Biologically-Inspired Networks. That's right: BaTMAN and RoBIN.

This dynamic duo of programs aims to turn basic biology into a tool for better situational awareness and decision-making. Put in DARPA's own words, BaTMAN would strive to "develop an understanding of the relationship between biological systems and the spatial-temporal universe through the application of advanced principles from the physical sciences," while RoBIN will seek to "apply the critical control features of biological networks to build unique models for adaptable networks, and create a dynamic biologically-inspired network of scientists and other experts for crisis response and complex decision support."

DARPA wants BaTMAN applicants to look into micro-scale physical and biological laws -- things like quantum and biological clocks, physiological signal processing, and synchronized natural rhythms -- and their influences on the world at large. The DoD would ostensibly use such mechanisms to "transform biology from a descriptive to a predictive field of science."

For its part, RoBIN would explore more macro-scale characteristics of nature -- group behaviors, complex adaptable networks, and other principles of biological design -- to inform the strategies used in complicated decision-making processes (presumably in situations of gravity, such as in life-and-death battlefield scenarios or weighty decision-making procedures higher up the chain of command).

Leveraging biology into better military performance is exactly what we expect from DARPA, but there is one mild disappointment here: two programs called named for the Dark Knight and his sidekick, and not a single mention of gravity defying grappling hooks, multi-wheeled all-terrain vehicles, or utility belts that, despite their compact size, contain any conceivable gadget one might require to escape a nefarious trap? It's almost as much of a letdown as Batman Forever.

[Danger Room]

In DARPA’s own words: “To meet the relentlessly increasing demands for greater performance, higher energy efficiency, ease of programmability, system dependability, and security, revolutionary new research, development, and design will be essential to enable new generations of advanced DoD computing system capabilities and new classes of computer applications. Current evolutionary approaches to progress in computer designs are inadequate.”

The inadequacies of current designs are the same ones computer scientists the world over are trying to overcome, namely the fact that cramming more and more transistors onto a chip won’t keep computing in line with Moore’s law forever. Also problematic: faster clock speeds means more power consumption (and ostensibly more heat). To go beyond the petaflop, we’ll need to think outside our current server boxes.

To achieve such mind-numbing speeds, DARPA suggests developers get to work improving pretty much every aspect of computing (perhaps that’s why it’s called the Omnipresent High Performance Computing (OHPC) initiative), including hardware, software, processing algorithms, programming language, and power management. That last item is going to be key for computers that will run at such speeds, as one quintillion calculations per second can be expected to suck up some serious juice.

DARPA wants its UHPC systems (and its OHPC exaflop computers) by 2018.

[FedBizOpps via Network World]