Monday, March 31, 2008

Military dishes millions for UNM's weapons research - Opinion

 

UNM receives millions of dollars in funding for research from all branches of the U.S. military, Department of Defense and the weapons industry while maintaining close ties to the federal defense establishment.
The most recent example of this occurred just last week. According to the Tuesday edition of UNM Today, UNM President David Schmidly recently signed a new memorandum of understanding with Sandia National Laboratories. The article states that the purpose of this MOU is to "enhance the opportunities for top students at UNM to find placement at Sandia" and "help secure external funding for research projects" in areas including "computing and information infrastructure," "homeland defense" and "national security."
According to its Web site, Sandia National Laboratories is heavily involved in military planning and weapons research and other research with war applications, including C3ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Integrated Military Systems for Missile Defense and Strike Systems, complex adaptive systems and Homeland Defense and Force Protection.

C3ISR is a new term to me.  It points the way for further research to see what is being done in that field.

Military dishes millions for UNM's weapons research - Opinion

 

Friday, March 14, 2008

DARPA spends $13 million more for fast language translation software | NetworkWorld.com Community

Success in this endeavor would have an immediate affect on the speed of knowledge transfer.  It would be a basic enabling device.

DARPA in December awarded BBN Technologies a $5.6 million contract to develop an automated translation system for handheld, laptop or desktop computers.And last January DARPA awarded BBN a $16 million contract extension of its Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. GALE is intended to develop and apply software technologies to transcribe speech, translate both speech and text, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, with over 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Such a capability would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion.

With this latest contract award, BBN will continue to work in Arabic from both speech and text sources to meet increasingly steep accuracy goals, BBN said.For DARPA the goal is to build a prototype system that quickly provides relevant, distilled, actionable information to military commands and personnel by converting foreign language text images into English transcripts automatically (without the use of linguists and analysts) and with high accuracy, the agency said in a release. 

DARPA spends $13 million more for fast language translation software | NetworkWorld.com Community

 

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Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Airplane Stays Aloft for Five Years

Essentially, the Vulture is an aircraft that operates like a satellite, but is not regulated by orbital mechanics. "It could be positioned over the battle, at 65,000ft versus 260 miles," says Pulliam. Operating as a pseudo-satellite in the stratosphere and not low Earth orbit would provide a 65dB improvement in communications capability, he says, and significantly increase onboard sensor resolution.


There are three architecture options, says Newman: a single ultra-reliable system equivalent to a satellite a modular vehicle where pieces can fly home to be repaired and replaced and an aircraft that can be serviced and replenished while remaining on station.





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How Future

My colleague Alec Klein has been showing just why there's such concern. For starters, the project, with Boeing as the main contractor, is expected to cost some $200 billion. Boeing has been having some troubles on government contracts lately, as some of you know.


Sadly, based on the past performance of technology contractors, the actual price tag could end up at $400 billion, maybe more. Who knows?


Here's what Alec wrote in The Washington Post in December. "In the Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks. It's as networked as the Internet, as mobile as a cellphone, as intuitive as a video game. The Army has a name for this vision: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say.


"It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures. At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition, leaving the Army little time and few resources to prepare for new threats



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