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DARPA Project Babylon: Universal Translator

Posted by michael on from the unleash-the-kitty dept.

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

1 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Flexible? Basic Research? DARPA? by upper · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yeah, wasting an exorbitant amount of tax dollars, sure. Like the internet.

    Yes, DARPA had one really great hit -- about 34 years ago.

    Be cynical as you want, but DARPA is the one government agency which is really flexible and has a vision. With the rise of corporate dependency on innovation, even in the academic world, DARPA is one of the last bastions of basic research.

    I can be awfully cynical about DARPA. My former employer's bread and butter was DARPA research. Which is to say that our primary products were proposals and billable hours. Many of those billable hours were spent documenting our activities -- presentations, review meetings, progress reports, final reports. Sometimes we had time for actual research, the direction of which changed with the whims of the DARPA program manager and was at best loosely correlated with the work proposed in the proposal. I'm not accusing my former employer of wrongdoing; that's the flavor of pointy hair induced by DARPA policies.

    By the way, DARPA doesn't do basic research. In basic research, most of which is still done in universities, you give lip service to vague area of applications, but the real goal is understanding. DARPA's research goals are always applied -- i.e. the goal is always to produce something useful, not simply to understand the world. But it's "early R&D", farther from being applicable than most R&D, and too much of a long shot for most R&D organizations. The rule of thumb is that if nobody else in the Dept. of Defense thinks they know how to solve the problem, DARPA works on it. (This translator work seems to be an exception).

    So most of DARPA's work is in the gap between basic research typical R&D. Ideas seem to get stuck in this gap for decades, which is why DARPA was created. But there's been too much pressure for short-term results for too long, so the agency is badly broken.