BBN grabs cash, turns up heat on language translation technology

When it comes to translating languages in real time, BBN must speak the tongue as it netted a $14 million check from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week to continue developing its speech and text technology.

BBN has now taken in over $30 million from DARPA over the past few years to fill out the agency's Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The goal of GALE is to translate and distill foreign language material (television shows and newspapers) in near real-time, highlight salient information, and store the results in a searchable database - all with more than 90% accuracy by the end of the program. Through this process, GALE would help U.S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages quickly so they could act on it in a timely fashion.

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During the first three years of the GALE program, BBN met or exceeded the accuracy goals for automatic translation of Arabic newswire text and broadcast news into English. Under this latest contract award, BBN will continue to work in Arabic from both speech and text sources to meet increasingly steep accuracy goals. BBN continues to work in Chinese under a separate award, the company said.

The BBN system will support multiple printed or handwritten document types including, hard copy, PDF files, photographs, newsprint, and signs. With the system, BBN will integrate optical character recognition and its state-of-the-art translation and distillation techniques to develop novel methods for processing handwritten text, BBN said.

The system will enable English-speaking military personnel and analysts to extract valuable information from a much larger number of foreign language documents than is now possible, facilitate rapid responses to emerging threats.

According to DARPA, GALE is making progress toward achieving this very ambitious goal by 2011. The agency is developing the System for Tactical Use program, a two-way speech translation system to convert spoken foreign language input to English output and vice versa.

BBN is doing lots of work for DARPA in the language and text interpretation field. Earlier this year it got $29.7 million from the Air Force to develop a prototype machine reading system that transforms prose into knowledge that can be interpreted by an artificial intelligence application.

The prototype is part of the DARPA's Machine Reading Program (MRP) that wants to develop systems that can capture knowledge from naturally occurring text and transform it into the formal representations used by AI reasoning systems.

The idea is that such an intelligent learning system could gather and analyze information from the Web such as international technological advances or plans and rhetoric of political organizations and unleash a wide variety of new military and civilian Artificial Intelligence applications from intelligent bots to personal tutors according to DARPA.

As digitized text from library books world wide becomes available, new avenues of cultural awareness and historical research will be enabled. With techniques for effectively handling the incompatibilities between natural language and the language of formal inference, a system could, in principal, be constructed that maps between natural and formal languages in any subject domain, DARPA said.

Crime lab saves energy costs by turning up heat in the data center

There's plenty of evidence that turning up the temperature in data centers is both cost-effective and safe, but many IT shops are still reluctant to take the plunge. CIO Joseph Tait of NMS Labs in Pennsylvania admits "it was an uncomfortable decision" when his IT team raised the thermostat from 68 to 73 degrees Fahrenheit.

But cost and environmental concerns had spurred a company-wide green initiative at NMS, a "CSI"-like crime lab near Philadelphia, and reducing HVAC costs was one of the top priorities. NMS started implementing its green initiative last year, and the project will ultimately include virtualization in the data center and a solar power system to provide 30% of the company's power.  

"Who doesn't want to reduce costs?" Tait says. "[We started] this before the economy even tanked."

Tait is one of many IT executives who will be sharing their stories and best practices at Network World's IT Roadmap Conference & Expo in Philadelphia next week, one of 10 such events being held in various U.S. locations throughout 2009.

NMS Labs handles clinical toxicology and forensic testing, often for criminal cases. It's not as glamorous as "CSI" but "it's interesting, certainly," Tait says. "We get everything from blood work resulting from a run-of-the-mill DUI stop all the way up to DNA evidence under a murder victim's fingernails."

NMS has about 75 scientific instruments, 50 servers and 350 computers overall. Powering down devices that don't need to be on 24 hours a day has helped save energy, as have other initiatives, including upgrades to refrigeration, UPS and generator systems; video teleconferencing; automated power management systems; and using efficient light bulbs.

NMS has cut electricity costs by roughly 15% to 20% and has more cost-saving projects on the way.

The company is planning a solar panel project that could provide 25% to 30% of its power by next year. With tax incentives, the project is a no-brainer, according to Tait.

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Inside the data center, upgraded cooling equipment and virtualization will play key roles. Tait is building a new data center that will replace four out-of-date air conditioning units with two larger ones. He is also phasing out older servers and planning to virtualize new ones that replace them.

"We've got about 50 servers in our data center and we're thinking virtualization can cut that in half," he says.

Tait is hoping a smaller number of servers, with virtualization, will lower his power needs and simplify management.

"Simplify and standardize is a good strategic plan for any IT department," he says. "What we've got here is a very complicated and customized environment that over the years was built into a messy bird's nest full of stuff."

While NMS is a relatively small company with 225 employees and two facilities within a mile and a half of each other, IT Roadmap attendees will also hear from Terry Harris, former CTO of De Lage Landen (DLL), a global financial services firm. Harris will discuss building resilient, dynamic data centers, and a DLL project that consolidated the company's data centers from five to two, one in the United States and another in Europe.

Key technologies for the consolidation project included VMware virtualization for x86 servers, IBM Power virtualization, and EMC's Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) disaster recovery replication software.

DLL wanted two sites separated in distance to avoid the possibility of a regional disaster shutting down both data centers. "We wanted multiple replication and failover scenarios. With SRDF we could replicate over a long distance," Harris says. "In order to accomplish that, we had to install a global high-speed wide-area network connecting the two data centers."

Harris left DLL in January and became an infrastructure architecture consultant with Synthes, a medical device company in West Chester, Penn. Synthes is not consolidating data centers but is designing a similar "twin center" concept in an effort to ensure resiliency and become more responsive to business needs, Harris says.

In the years after Sept. 11, 2001, businesses are paying much greater attention to availability and resiliency in their IT infrastructures, he says.

"You're obligated to improve the resilience of your infrastructure," Harris says. "At the same time you're improving your resilience, you can also make it more dynamic by leveraging real-time infrastructure computing concepts, the ability to provision services and tear down services very quickly in response to business needs. By making your infrastructure more resilient and dynamic, that helps your IT department become a business enabler."

Another speaker at IT Roadmap will be Tom Amrhein, the CIO of Forrester Construction in Maryland, who will discuss managed services, software-as-a-service and cloud computing.

Forrester Construction is using managed services for VoIP and application management, and contracts with Iron Mountain for off-site backup, retention and storage. Amrhein will discuss how various outsourcing models can help offload IT tasks that don't differentiate the business, and let the IT department "shift resources to tasks that make our business more competitive and better serve our customers," he said.