Post Tagged with: "darpa"

DARPA Temporary Tattoos Want a Tattoo That Tracks Troops’ Vitals

DARPA Temporary Tattoos Want a Tattoo That Tracks Troops’ Vitals

Temporary tattoo/sensor

From Danger Room:

In its ongoing quest to measure every aspect of U.S. troops’ physiology, the Pentagon’s esoteric research enclave wants to develop a durable, unobtrusive device that can track the body’s physical response to stress. Military scientists believe that using the device — preferably a tattoo — to track heart-rate, temperature or bio-electric response during various training situations will help them crack the code of combat fatigue.

Darpa, the same guys who are working on robot ostriches, battlefield illusions and a texting spy camera, recently requested research proposals to develop the next generation of bio-statistic devices. The solicitation, which opened last month, hopes new technologies can transcend the current paradigm of patient monitoring of needles, gels and electrodes. And advanced materials make it possible to integrate everything from the sensors to the transmitter into thumb-sized membranes that can stick to skin — like temporary tattoos.

Full Story: Wired Danger Room: Pentagon’s Mad Scientists Want a Tattoo That Tracks Troops’ Vitals

See also: Electronic Sensors Printed Directly on the Skin

This makes a lot of sense to me. I recently tried out a BodyMedia arm band, but returned it because it was a bit too big to wear day to day (it wouldn’t be bad for wearing just during workouts though). But a temporary tattoo that could track much of the same stats would solve the bulk/appearance problem without having to resort to, y’know, implants.

March 27, 2013 0 comments
Darpa Wants You to Transcribe, and Instantly Recall, All of Your Conversations

Darpa Wants You to Transcribe, and Instantly Recall, All of Your Conversations

“Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever,” writes Danger Room’s Robert Beckhusen. That’s what DARPA is working on:

Analyzing speech and improving speech-to-text machines has been a hobby horse for Darpa in recent years. But this takes it a step further, in exploring the ways crowdsourcing can make it possible for our speech to be recorded and stored forever. But it’s not just about better recordings of what you say. It’ll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity — like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech.

Full Story: Darpa Wants You to Transcribe, and Instantly Recall, All of Your Conversations

March 6, 2013 1 comment
Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, Misses And Ones To Watch

Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, Misses And Ones To Watch

DARPA Z-Man Geckskin

This is actually from 2008, but it’s a pretty good overview of DARPA projects:

From the “ones to watch”:

Z-man: The aim: to allow soldiers to scale vertical walls without ropes or ladders at a rate of 0.5 metres a second. The solution: mimic the microscopic hairs, or “setae”, that allow geckos to stroll up walls and across ceilings. Small robots that climb using synthetic setae have already been demonstrated, but DARPA hopes to extend this technology to humans.

Full Story: New Scientist: Fifty years of DARPA: Hits, Misses And Ones To Watch

DARPA Z-Man page

October 21, 2012 0 comments
U.S. Military Funding Research On “Spidey Sense”

U.S. Military Funding Research On “Spidey Sense”

The Office of Naval research wants to fund more research on intuition:

esearch in human pattern recognition and decision-making suggest that there is a “sixth sense” through which humans can detect and act on unique patterns without consciously and intentionally analyzing them. Evidence is accumulating that this capability, known as intuition or intuitive decision making, enables the rapid detection of patterns in ambiguous, uncertain and time restricted information contexts, that it informs the decision making process and, most importantly, that it may not require domain expertise to be effective. These properties make intuition a strong candidate for further exploration as the basis for developing a new set of decision support training technologies. The proposed topic will lead to new insights into intuitive decision making, and develop new approaches for enhancing this process.

General Services Office: OFFICE OF NAVAL RESEARCH BASIC RESEARCH CHALLENGE – ENHANCING INTUITIVE DECISION MAKING THROUGH IMPLICIT LEARNING

(via Adam Flynn)

See also: The Weaponizatoin Of Neuroscience and DARPA combines human brains and 120-megapixel cameras to create the ultimate military threat detection system

September 20, 2012 Comments are Disabled
DARPA Has Seen the Future of Computing … And It’s Analog

DARPA Has Seen the Future of Computing … And It’s Analog

DARPA UPSIDE analog processors

By definition, a computer is a machine that processes and stores data as ones and zeroes. But the U.S. Department of Defense wants to tear up that definition and start from scratch.

Through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the DoD is funding a new program called UPSIDE, short for Unconventional Processing of Signals for Intelligent Data Exploitation. Basically, the program will investigate a brand-new way of doing computing without the digital processors that have come to define computing as we know it.

The aim is to build computer chips that are a whole lot more power-efficient than today’s processors — even if they make mistakes every now and then.

The way Darpa sees it, today’s computers — especially those used by mobile spy cameras in drones and helicopters that have to do a lot of image processing — are starting to hit a dead end. The problem isn’t processing. It’s power, says Daniel Hammerstrom, the Darpa program manager behind UPSIDE. And it’s been brewing for more than a decade.

Full Story: Wired Enterprise: Darpa Has Seen the Future of Computing … And It’s Analog

August 22, 2012 1 comment
Former DARPA Director Heading Up New Experimental Technology Department At Google

Former DARPA Director Heading Up New Experimental Technology Department At Google

Remember how earlier this year Regina Dugan, the former director of DARPA, took a job at Google? Now we know what she’s up to there:

Google has also created a department within Motorola—Advanced Technology and Projects—comprised of researchers charged with finding cutting-edge technologies that could give Motorola’s products an edge. And the executive refresh includes a new senior vice president, Regina Dugan, a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s long-term research arm. [...]

But whether the DARPA research model can work in the fast-evolving world of smartphones is unclear, says Chetan Sharma, a wireless analyst in Seattle. “Regina does bring in outside perspective specially related to projects that are leaps, versus incremental steps,” he says. “However, this will need to be executed under the constraints of competition, time, and money.”

While DARPA has had some storied successes—such as the precursor to the Internet—it also freely admits that it often fails. And it has pursued some odd projects, such as setting up a research program to figure out how to reassemble shredded documents.

Technology Review: Can DARPA’s Strategy Help Motorola Compete Again?

August 14, 2012 2 comments
The Weaponization of Neuroscience

The Weaponization of Neuroscience

Jon Bardin wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education on how science can be weaponized, even decades after it’s conducted. For example, this DARPA project is based on unrelated research from the 1960s:

In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain’s performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man’s brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

Chronicles of Higher Education: From Bench to Bunker

(Thanks Justin!)

July 12, 2012 0 comments
DARPA Training Computers to Write Dossiers

DARPA Training Computers to Write Dossiers

DARPA is trying to put me out of a job:

They look a bit like communally written Wikipedia pages. But these articles—concise profiles of people and organizations, complete with lists of connected organizations, people, and events—were in fact written by computers, in a new bid by the Pentagon to build machines that can follow global news events and provide intelligence analysts with useful summaries in close to real time. [...]

On the new site, if you search for information on the Nigerian jihadist movement Boko Haram, you get this entirely computer-generated summary: “Founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002, Boko Haram is led by Ibrahim Abubakar Shekau. (Former leaders include Mohammed Yusuf.) It has headquarters in Maiduguri. It has been described as ‘a new radical fundamentalist sect,’ ‘the main anchor for mayhem in the state,’ ‘a fractured sect with no clear structure,’ and ‘the misguided extremist sect.’ “

Lucky for me:

The profile of Barack Obama, for example, correctly identifies him as the president of the United States, but then summarizes him this way: “Obama has been described as ‘Nobel Peace Prize winner,’ ‘the only reasonable guy in the room,’ ‘an anti-apartheid campus divestment activist,’ and ‘the most trusted politician in the CR-poll.’ ”

At another point it notes, “Obama is married to Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama; other family members include Henry Healy, Malia Obama, and Ann Dunham.” (Healy is a distant Obama cousin from Moneygall, Ireland. Obama’s younger daughter, Sasha, isn’t mentioned.)

The system lacks real-world knowledge that would help a human analyst recognize something as false, humorous, or plainly irrelevant.

MIT Technology Review: An Online Encyclopedia that Writes Itself

Yes, it’s a far cry from replacing your favorite non-fiction writers, but the possibility that this sort of thing could start to cut into the total number of paid writing and editing positions in the next few years is starting to get real.

See also: Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?

July 5, 2012 0 comments
Russia Wants Its Own DARPA

Russia Wants Its Own DARPA

RIA Novosti reports on Putin’s plan for the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects in the Defense Industry, a Russian equivalent to DARPA.

President Vladimir Putin has submitted to parliament a bill on the foundation’s establishment, which is expected to become Russia’s answer to the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The foundation will be tasked with informing the country’s leadership on projects that can ensure Russian superiority in defense technology.

It will also analyze the risks of any Russian technological backwardness and technological dependence on other powers.

Full Story: RIA Novosti: Russia to Take on ‘High Risk’ Defense Research Projects

(via Wired Danger Room)

June 26, 2012 0 comments
For DARPA, What’s After Autonomous Cars? Humanoid Robots

For DARPA, What’s After Autonomous Cars? Humanoid Robots

Word on the street is that DARPA is following up its autonomous vehicles Grand Challenge with a humanoid robots challenge. According to Travis Deyle:

It seems we’re going to have a new DARPA Grand Challenge! The BAA with formal details should be out very soon, but for now we’re bringing you the unofficial, preliminary details based on notes from Dr. Gill Pratt’s talk at DTRA Industry Day: The new Grand Challenge is for a humanoid robot (with a bias toward bipedal designs) that can be used in rough terrain and for industrial disasters. The robot will be required to maneuver into and drive an open-frame vehicle (eg. tractor), proceed to a building and dismount, ingress through a locked door using a key, traverse a 100 meter rubble-strewn hallway, climb a ladder, locate a leaking pipe and seal it by closing off a nearby valve, and then replace a faulty pump to resume normal operations — all semi-autonomously with just “supervisory teleoperation.” That’s a tough challenge, but it should be fun! It looks like there will be six hardware teams to develop new robots, and twelve software teams using a common platform (PETMAN anyone?!). The most crazy part about all of this: The United States is getting back into the humanoid robot game… in a big way! [...]

The US has largely turned its back on legged humanoid robots over the last two decades (unlike Japan). I actually thought this was a good? thing, particularly for service and home robots, but perhaps the military perspective is altogether different? This is sort of ironic given that Japanese roboticists are (somewhat) refocusing on non-legged robots in the wake of the Fukushima embarrassment. [For those not in the know, Japanese roboticists have been chided by the government for their inability to apply robots in the disaster. Furthermore, there was some embarrassment when iRobot, a foreign company, stepped in to lend robotic assistance. ]

Hizook: New DARPA Grand Challenge for Humanoid Robots — Preliminary (Unofficial) Details

April 5, 2012 1 comment