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DARPA Project Babylon: Universal Translator
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!)"
babelfish... proving yet again that sci-fi steers science and innovation. ;)
universal translator? i wonder if any trekkies patented it, or if it's even patentable?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
The next big thing I think would be a "smart" translator that can do pattern recognition and "learn" as it gets more of the language. IIRC This is how the star trek translators work.
Kind of the difference between pattern checking, and anomaly detection in virus scanners.
I wonder if it will do Klingon to Romulan
or maybe haXor to newbie
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
Well, someone had to say it.
Visit me on #weirdness on the Galaxynet.
It's a two-way translator, is it? Wouldn't it be hilarious if they forgot to prevent feedback loops? Someone says something in English, and it gets translated into Spanish, and upon hearing something said in Spanish, translates it back into English, and so on. "Hello-Hola-Hello-Hola-Hello..."
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
This will go great with my Palm III tricorder simulator! How long till the Klingon version arrives?
Yeah, wasting an exorbitant amount of tax dollars, sure. Like the internet.
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. Get with it.
Like other such plans, task the final result to this so-called "universal translator" I will be an other device of which the escape for all the complex translation will be a morass knot-recognizable of the verbage.* * The above was a translation of the following from English to Italian, and then back to English again using Babelfish: Like other such projects, I think the end result of this so-called "universal translator" will be another device whose output for any complex translation will be a barely-recognizable morass of verbage.
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That's cause they have all their technical people working on something real worthy. A free video game, well semi free. I'm sure I'll get a call from my local recruiter after he sees me play.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Maybe the first step should be to solve the translation problem on one machine in one direction. As far as I know this is still a pretty tough problem and the only working systems are still on a par with the machine text translators. In other words a long way to go yet. The challenge lies in the fact that different languages express the same thing differently and there is no one to one map between words,still less phrases or sentences. Maybe you can get the gist of a simple paragraph from an auto translation, but if the language is tricky, colloquial or just badly written you have little chance.
Like other such plans, task the final result to this so-called "universal translator" I will be an other device of which the escape for all the complex translation will be a morass knot-recognizable of the verbage.*
* The above was the following, translated into Italian, and then back to English again using Babelfish:
Like other such plans, task the final result to this so-called "universal translator" I will be an other device of which the escape for all the complex translation will be a morass knot-recognizable of the verbage. Someone mod my ill-formatted comment down to -1, please.
it was done by a "lieutenant colonel" (LTC). well, army research == gov't geeks. you get what you pay for. =)
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
(emphasis added)
Does this set off alarm bells for anyone? Those are complicated languages, and I believe Mandarin in particular is EXTREMELY tonal (i.e., doesn't work well in speech recognition).
Look, just imagine which you get out of Babelfish. Now take it a few levels up, to speech. Does this proposal in any way sound achievable? (again, pun unintended)
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
It is probably easier to send kids off to various parts of the world and have them learn to speak various languages, and then have them come back to serve the military, or whoever needs translation services. The human brain is probably the only translator that can perform up to our expectations. I just don't see the silver lining to take us from Babelfish-like translation to something the DARPA project proposes to do.
and the silly thing is that they DONT NEED ANY MORE RECRUITS!!! the govt should cancel that krap and cut their marketing budget. What's the point of adv. when they dont need anyone to signup?!?!?!!?
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
It's cool that they're working on this and all, but their promises of building these into PDA's set off a flag in my mind. There's another company that, as of a couple of years ago, had developed a realtime program that allows one to speak english into a mic and have spoken japanese come out.
I remember reading that they needed serious processing power and RAM to make this work. (At least 512 megs...) It seems like if one language takes up this amount of resources, then it'll be a while before we have a multi-lingual PDA...
Maybe their technique is different? I dunno. I know it's not the same company.
I guess I'm just concerned about this being vaporware.
"Derp de derp."
Probably a reference to the Tower of Babel.
"... the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy" - Janov Pelorat
So... now every USMC ground-pounder will be able to say "die, motherfucker, die" in 32 different languages?
Awesome.
Ah......another nice subsidy for high tech industry, funded by the generosity of American taxpayers.
Initial impression: boy are they in a hurry. Very aggressive time table for this project. 6 Months to "Emergency DARPA", 18 Months to 3 functional prototypes.
Then I saw what languages it will have: Arabic , Mandarin (the part of china that border Pakistan and India is mainly Islamic), Pashto (Pakistan/Afganistan), Dari (Iran/Afgan/etc)
Oh. What I want to know is what those 8 other languages are that they want to have the ability to add to it later?
Burn Hollywood Burn
What do we have?
MOP
First they took over the Cult Awareness Network, then they started selling Linux, and now they've taken over the U.S. Army.
Oh, what hath Xenu wrought?
They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect...
You mean he would be a good one to shake the bugs out of the system since he played a character that was really good at destroying advanced systems (by posing confusing questions to them)?
Wasn't Colonel James Bass a charactor in a Clive Cussler novel?
The timeline strikes me as being a little optimistic, considering the difficult nature of the problem.
Actually, I think you patent something *after* it has been invented ;-)
... The current USPTO is perfectly happy to patent unproven and/or obvious ideas where software is concerned. Been reading Slashdot long? :)
Oh, no
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I'd much rather see them give it to Linda Park (Hoshi Sato on 'Enterprise'). She's the one who really made the universal translators famous. On TOS, the concept was mostly ignored ("They always worked perfectly -- Yeah! That's the story!"). On Enterprise, she does the translating almost as often as the translator does.
Besides, I'd much rather see her recieving the thing in a newscast than Shatner (she's cuter!).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Though this quote both cracked me up and
shows how much the rest of the military thinks of
DARPA.
"Holy cow, an actual tech transfer!? This is very un-DARPA like, I like it!"
- Major General Clifford Stanley,
Deputy Commanding General Combat,
Development Command Quantico Marine Base
Isn't anybody going to comment on it. DARPA has been getting their ass kicked because of it....
I'm the last person to be offended, but even i think i'd in poor taste.
In the DARPA world, powerpoint isn't just for executive types. It's the primary mode of communication. For contractors, the quarterly PPT presentations are the most important contract deliverable. They're second only to proposals in their importance to the contracting firms. (Proposals get you the contract, presentations help you keep them.) Research results are tertiary.
You should have at least posted your correction as non-anonymous, so we don't have to read the inevitable flames. :)
I'll post this at 1 so maybe people will read the parent AC post before being too hard on you. It happens to all of us sometimes.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Will it translate between geek and newbie?
The timeline strikes me as being a little optimistic, considering the difficult nature of the problem.
In the technical document in the 1+1 section, it states they want to build a highly constrained translation device. Given the languages they want to translate, and the fact that they're in a hurry, my bet is that this system is being built so that operatives who only speak the target languages and not English can relay possible intelligence regarding terrorist threats the CIA/NSA. Therefore, its vocabulary is probably limited to common words and "threat assessment" words. If you started talking to someone about the latest fashions, it probably wonuldn't understand.
Why not Nichelle Nichols? After all, Uhura was the communications officer.
And if you want to talk about universal translators in sci-fi, Larry Niven's version was much better done in the Ringworld series. It didn't just magically make everyone speak English (or Interworld or whatever), it had limitations too: it had to listen to the foreign tongue for some time, to learn a minimal vocabulary, before it could begin communicating, which it did only haltingly at first. It sometimes couldn't translate words like <something> for which it had no context to deduce meaning. These limitations made for some interesting moments like the time Louis Wu had been captured by a woman who didn't talk much, and so he had to bide his time until the translator finally heard enough words to learn her language.
But then again, the Ringworld was unstable...
--Jim
The "Babylonian" reference may at first seem apt: the towers were built 'to the heavens' (well, pretty high) and a lack of communication and understanding among peoples led to their downfall.
However, the underlying, unspoken subtext of a comparison between us and Babylon is that we displeased God. Remember, in the Bible at least (there's other versions in other histories/religions), God was displeased, and the language confusion among the peoples was caused in order to bring us down.
What this logo basically tells the world (or at least those who have an understanding of the mythos) isn't that we're a great nation and metter communication would have helped us - it's that we went against God, and this is how we paid.
This sounds a lot like those right-wing extremists who tried to blame the attack on 'communists' and homosexuals in our country making God upset.
Now, I feel, like many people do, that our country has done a great many things wrong: setting policy based on oil needs and not human rights, keeping some smaller countries' governments (including some democracies) destabilized in order to serve our own interests, etc. However, just as I don't think that we can claim "God is on our side," neither do I think anyone can claim that God isn't.
This logo is offensive. That it shows the half-thought-out mentality of some of the people in charge at our governmental agencies should be a cause for alarm, not applause. We have been called Babylon by many people with grievances against us, and it seems our leaders are reveling in the name.
Get off my launchpad!
Here's me reading the article:
Wow.... Cool...
Wow.... Uncool.
Does this proposal in any way sound achievable?
Not unless they solve the general AI problem first. In other words, no. You need a machine with a HAL-like intelligence to do good real-time translation. The machine will need to go to school for a few years to learn the idiosynchracies of each language and culture. No way this technology can fit into a portable translator given the current state of computer technology. Besides, even human beings have a hard time interpreting languages that they are fluent in.
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I've been hitting reload hoping that somebody will post some links to the real-time one-way translators which were mentioned in the post... anybody have some information on said devices?
Now I have to post my same reply to this comment. :)
You spelled verbiage wrong, so don't blame the translator for that. See other comment for informative link.
(I think you should just roll with it if you post a badly formatted comment, or at least parent it under your first one)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Nothing exists before it exists however one thing can exist before another or before a point in time. I pre-exist my younger sister, and obviously my intellect meta-exists yours...
"Secrecy is the Beginning of Tyranny" "No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law" -Robert Heinlein
Then you can visit Japan, forget you have it in, and call your friends back in the states with stories like "No, I'm not kidding. Everyone hear speaks fluent english, most of them with southern californian accents, it's the craziest shit I've ever seen."
Or hell, even better, he audibly corrects your grammar in real time for all around to hear, so when slip into gangsta mode at lan parties you become a laughing stock.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
DARPA has been funding in one way or another the premiere researchers in speech recognition, Dr. James and Dr. Janet Baker. Perhaps DARPA should have shown a little more foresight before the Bakers were permitted to sell off Dragon Systems to the Belgian corporation Lernout & Hauspie, which subsequently collapsed in bankruptcy amid fraud allegations, auctioning off assets such as Dragon Systems to ScanSoft, a Xerox spinoff.
If DARPA doesn't in the name of national security (look at the languages that are the candidates for the initial Babylon competitors) simply override what noncompete clauses, patents, etc. that would keep the Bakers from working full-time on this project then they have learned nothing from almost decades of the Bakers' kicking the ass of the entire speech recognition community with their superior statistical approach. Unfortunately I suspect that various government regulations would not permit DARPA to pay a fair market value for the Bakers' services. This to me illustrates how far the United States has fallen from any capacity to mobilize the scientific and engineering community for modern equivalents to the Manhattan Project, except for medical technology.
Cynical? No..it just bugs me when our government flaunts internally that they want to grab a buttload of cash so they can translate 2 languages simultaneously....
They act like kids in a free candy store.. bring on the cash! gimmie! gimmie! gimmie! no wonder hammers cost the army $550.oo and toilet seat go for $300.oo...no accountability on the cost of these 'important' projects..
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
It's actually quite interesting to note that in the historical Babylon, the tower of Babel was supposedly built by individuals with hubris. They wanted their invention, the tower, to reach to heaven. That's why their god made them all speak in different languages, so that their work would be interrupted (just FYI, in Swedish, the word "babbel" means "nonsense talk").
That's why I find it strange that translation devices (HW or SW) are called babel-this and babel-that. It would be better to call them debabel-this or debabel-that instead.
Another interesting parallel is that between the tower of Babel and this project of DARPA. Both tries to achieve fairly unreachable goals, and you've got to have a fair amount of hubris to think you're able to carry them through. A general purpose translation device is not an easy thing to construct, especially when considering the number of dialects spoken in each language. Also, languages are ever-developing and the meaning of a sentence depend on more than just context.
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
Thought about it. But irregardless, it's a very unique article. (ok, now for the burn...good enough)
I wonder how a universal translator would handle stuff like "pre-existing," "irregardless," and "very unique." Or ubonics, for that matter.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Sorry... here or google search "DARPA one-way translator" here
For those who don't know, an N-gram is data structure which encodes the statistics of word order in a language. These are used to greatly improve the accuracy of language pattern matchers such as speech recognition.
A typical speech recognizer might use a 3 word N-gram (tri-gram), which keeps track of all probable words which follow and thier likelyhoods. The probabilities are calculated by running terabytes of english text (books, magazines, internet chat boards) through a word counting program.
Thus, "green eggs and" will get a very high probability for "ham", but low for "jam", so it can bias a sound that seems to match "mam" acoustically to the more likely linquistic match "ham".
what a piece of pork _that_ was, and what good ever came of it. worthless, vile high tech industry.
so now am i "Insightful" too?
-mlibby
Should be called "Project Gokubi". Read the book Galapagos by Mr. Vonnegut.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
I'm hearing impaired, and I have a sign language interpreter. She basically translates from English into American Sign Language close to real time. However, there is a lag--5 words or so. She said that she needs to hear a part of a sentence to understand the concept and then pick the correct signs. I wouldn't be surprised if that happened to translators for verbal langiages. I just have a hard time with the idea that a real time universl translator would be very accurate.
"Black holes are where God divided by zero." - Steve Wright
Looks like the link to the Google cache version of the document is in error. Here is the correct link
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
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.
Will this spell doom for Esperanto and other (lesser-known) international auxilliary languages?
Bleh, color me impressed when they get plain old speech to text translators that can translate my ENGLISH into ENGLISH text.
Until then I will be VERY skeptical about any vocal to vocal translators.
I have tried out every generation of speech to text consumer software since 1990, and so far is has all been crap. Even if the government has technology that is 2x what the private sector is at;
well hell, 2x ~10% is still pretty darn shitty and NOT something to be relied on in times of war.
Bleh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Doesn't anyone remember the addendum to the babelfish?
''Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloddier wars than anything else in the history of creation.''
we're doomed. I'm taking names for a bus to mars.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect
What's the difference between respect and deference.
Dictionary.com isn't much help here.
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=respect
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=deference
We can't forget Homer's brother's invention! Wasn't it a baby translator? Or was it a dog translator.... tough to remember through the beer induced haze of college......
[Of course it's client-server; it runs on a LAN]
Because you need to train them for when you do need them. It does absolutely NO good to only recruit when you need to have soldiers on the field, instead you want them to have a few years of training to get atleast decent at the art of combat. Do you send a random person on the street to fight your war, or do you send a trained professional who knows what to do out.
Read the words "remember"... it's in Arabic too (tathekirou), and I suppose that is Chinese or maybe Korean on the left .... not quite sure what political meaning that is.
It's saying "remember... what happened when we couldn't translate all those cell phone calls that Echelon intercepted", or something like that!
ROFL! I didn't know the Pak were such awful whiners! Eat scrith, you scurvy plant-eaters!
If you look at the first page of the powerpoint file, it contains a picture (Bruegel) that shows the likely outcome of this project. An ambitiously large tower, abandoned and crumbling.
The picture was obviously taken from a painting of the Biblical Tower of Babel story. Given the state of AI, I predict about as much success for this project.
Why not make something that can be used by ordinary people during peactime activities...like at the FIFA World Cup that kicks off tomorrow. Think of the demand for interpretation, machine or otherwise.
Notice the languages it translates? Arabic and some others I believe are in the Afghani (sp?) area. Probably something to do with preventing further attacks from bin Laden by faster translation from those langauges to English
Where do you get the idea that we "don't need any more recruits"? We always need more recruits. It's not like the military ever says, "we're full, not hiring". All of military manpower is based on the idea that people move up and out. You always need more people at the bottom. Good recruiting years simply mean that you have enough people coming in (or enough to be a little more choosy about who you let in).
Well, did you notice that Arabic and Pashto are two of the languages included in the project? Makes sense
I am in the army right now, and according to the latest GSA catalog, a replacement toilet seat costs $8.00, mounting kit included.
Sorry dude, the 80s are over.
upon seeing the World Trade Centers being destroyed behind the cat?
That's a bad pussy......
I guess it's the most sickening yet use of the "terrorist" catch-word for getting public support.
This is quite offensive.
-twb
I didn't realise quite how many other areas they'd innovated in until now though:
Just goes to show all those right-wingers who go on about him being un-american and a hippy and stuff, eh?
Be careful! New moon tonight.
I know I'm mostly repeating what was implied by above poster, but this timetable could mean that something bad may be about to happen starting in 6 months and getting to full-scale whatevering in 18 months between the speakers of these languages.
-twb
A St. Petersberg company called Ectaco has already done this for bidirectional English-Russian handheld speech-to-speech translation. They call their stuff "Universal Translators" too.
I am impressed with the attempt to try to get a two way translator packed into a little box, but I don't think it's going to be much of a success. I gather the sudden need for computational translation is because the military simply has too few people who speak the languages of the areas that they cover. I also assume that this is in direct relation to the FBI/CIA etc requesting Pashto and Arabic speakers to come forward and help them after 9/11 last year and the difficulties in understanding a lot of the folk in Afghanistan who speak three major different languages (Pashto, Dari and Uzbek) with a whole bunch of dialects.
Sadly I think that it will be a waste of time. I speak six languages and at least one of them, Swiss-German, is not even a written language and here in Switzerland there about three major dialects of the language, some of which are not 100% mutually intelligible, and this in a Swiss-German population of about 5 million. I think that this system will run into the same sort of problems with languages like Arabic which has enormous dialectic variations in dialects say, from Algeria to Syria and people from the various areas can often not understand one another well. No one speaks classical Arabic of the Quran in day to day language use.
My guess is that the Military/CIA etc would be better advised to simply get people to learn the languages and to train others in using day to day expressions. This would have, amongst other things , the positive side effect that soldiers (some of them at least) would be better able to understand the culture and the situation of the local people where they are stationed. Not only this but people in all the countries I've lived in have reacted much, much better to me when I've tried to learn their language instead of being the usual culturally ignorant Anglo Tourist who expects everyone to speak English. I would argue that the general western ignorance (especially amongst English speakers) is one of the causes of the percieved arrogance seen by many third worlders. Another positive effect of learning the languages would be that there would be someone who would understand slang, as I think there's nothing like a bit of slang to throw off any translation software.
DARPA?? hmm, never heard of it. :) the whole agency sounds like vaporware. ha
------
[insert funny
i can't find it in the NY Times' archives for the life of me, but last year i read an article talking about how they had recently found documents which were untranslated at the time, but which very specifically gave the date time and location of the 1991 world trade center bombings about a year before they actually happened. the problem was that they had mountains of stuff to translate and not enough translators. this would solve that problem, and i'd imagine that there's some fear that 5 years down the road someone will translate an old interecepted email or something that says "spetember 11th, get on planes, run them into WTC" or something. the idea is that with this, we can translate everything we get, and that won't ever happen again
Is that code for wasting an exhorbinant amount of taqxpayers dollars?
;)
I think Americans will love this. Now we definitely don't have to learn any language other than American, uh, I mean English. Not that most of us were going to anyway
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
Don't foget that the Pentagon, too, was a target of attack on 9/11.
Spiritus ex Machina
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine."
Hey, they've finally realized who their core audiance is and have really been capitalizing on it as of late... Trek has always had it's share of bodies, but it seems they've just now realized how far they can push it... I mean, I can't help but to remember the "oil em up" scene in the Enterprise premier... If it were an Anime I'd be screaming "FAN SERVICE!!!!"
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I'll wait for DARPA (or maybe USAMRIID) to develop translator microbes for instanteous communication.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
From the PowerPoint presentation:
"Unlike RMS, many two-way translation components are immature or unstable"
That's funny. Everything I've read suggests that RMS is also immature and unstable.
But very consistent. Always consistent.
: Fruitbat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
I think you're spot on; definitely a Tower of Babel reference. And from the black cat I presume that they're hinting at hoping to receive early warnings about future disasters? A mixed metaphor and a little peculiar to be sure, but it seems to make sense.
-Wombat
All research ultimately is done to be applied. The difference between basic research and applied research is that the success rate is much higher with applied research, and the time to bring the technology is much lower. Only with basic research are big discoveries made, and I don't care what you've been hearing, but in the academic world there is a lot less basic research than ever.
The first move toward what we have today was the 'bayh-dole act' of the early 1980's which gave universities, even publicly funded universities, the right to 'own' the results of their own research. That together with the fact that universities are forced to license their research because they are getting progressively lower and lower public funding (that's what the act was for).
A few years ago some organization that represents the universities noted that while universities spend 40 billion dollars a year on research, they only brought in 800 million dollars from that research, and that is way too low. As if the only reason, and the only benefit gained, when universities do research is to make money. I assure you that that revenue figure is much higher today.
DARPA is not a one-trick pony. The only "invention" they can be credited with is the internet, and that's why basic research is so unglamourous. But regardless of what you've heard elsewhere, DARPA has advanced the processes in making microprocessors smaller/faster, and they've also done a lot of pioneering research in nanotechnology. The kind of research that they did pretty much started these industries.
Sounds like the Babel Fish to me!
Does this mean we now have a proof of why God does not exist? Or perhaps now there will be more wars because we can actually understand what people are really saying about us?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
I work for UCSB for Murat Karaorman (the head of the CS department for the College of Creative Studies and now an employee of TI), who worked on that project. They took 2nd place at a techno-fair for most impressive technology behind the technology that was called Digital Versatile Disks. It required a Sun server farm (and well in excess of your 512 Megs of RAM). Exremely cool stuff. Their demo was unrigged, members-of-the-audience style. The thing had a sizeable vocabulary. The company he worked for killed the technology, though. Maybe you read about something different, I'd be curious.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Wired magazine also pointed out the tastelessness and the weird symbolism (the destruction of the tower of Babel ??? ) of the logo. If you already discussed this very short article here, I apologize, if not and anyone is interested, I am happy to type it in tomorrow.
Neuroprosthesis News
I wonder if this Universal Translator will handle the canine language...
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Why? William Shatner played Captain Kirk. What he do that other Star Trek actors (captains or not) didn't? It's not like Kirk invented the universal translator or something. If he wanted to, Shatner has enough money to buy one of these things anyway.
If DARPA was going to give a beta-model universal translator to anyone it should be awarded posthumously to Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry. His wife, Majel Barret Roddenberry, is still alive.
From netcraft.com. The site www.darpa.mil is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.
Wonder if their translator thingmy is going to be Microsoft BobXP
If you figure out what that Universal Syntax is (sorry, I forgot the exact term he used - it's been a while, and my university education was in Dutch), you can feed that into a computer and teach it to reduce all phonemes from a given language to it.
Syntax is not nearly enough. Unless you know what the individual words mean, you're shit out of luck. As an example, linguists pretty much had the syntax of Egyptian hieroglyphics figured out, but it took the discovery of the Rosetta stone for them to begin to understand what they were reading. Even then, there is still stuff they can't figure out. Something similar (old Spanish/Maya lexicons compiled by missionaries) was required to decipher Mayan symbols.
These are essentially the same goals that were set forth decades ago. This is a very hard endeavor, and while noble, I really wish they'd be a bit more realistic. I'm in the academic research world and this particular subject is what I plan to work in for my doctorate. Based on my perliminary background work, the state of the art in MT (Machine Translation) has moved forward significantly, but there is still a LONG way to go. To give an example, very good speech recognition (accuracies of 85% and above) and MT have been realized for limited domains. An example is the CMU plane ticket reservation system. MIT is working with MandarinEnglish translations in a ticket reservation scheme (and having some inside knowledge from both universities, I can say that the systems are impressive, but still a far cry from the wishes of DARPA). The MIT system, while the English speech was definitely computerized, the Chinese was sufficiently good that if I hadn't known that it was being synthesized, I would have had a difficult time guessing except for the fact that some of the translations were a bit off. Not necessarily wrong, but just the particular word choice sounded odd. Continuing, to give an idea of what problems researchers are tackling, Consider just the recognizer part of the system. Imagine the vocabulary set needed to work with the afformentioned domains. It's very limited, moreover, the syntactical structure of the language is also very constrained. And mind you, this is all being done on some high end workstations and servers. And they want to do this on PDAs? Not anytime soon. I'm all for this research because I love languages, but I would say that the type of system that these guys are describing would take at LEAST 15 years to get to and that's if there are some major breakthroughs very soon. So don't get your hopes up.
Humorless sig goes here.
They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect..
If I recall the Trek backstory correctly, Spock's mother (a human woman) was the inventor of the universal translator. (And saved the show - no more needing to find planets where convergent evolution led to English-speaking neo-Romans.)
So give a copy to Nimoy as his inheritance. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Look. The military doesn't want to translate literature with this thing. They want something just good enough that US soldiers can communicate with the locals at a very basic level. It may be a struggle to communicate, but that's acceptable.
how much is a replacement brain? a replacement soul?
All research ultimately is done to be applied
...when? babbage's research was applied sort of, but it took a while...does that mean it was worthless because it didn't make money...
send a black gang member
I think the point is, if the software could learn, it could handle it in the same way you do.
In fact, I was saying the opposite. Research can have incredible value, even if it doesn't make any money.
Presumably they are trying to paralell the tower of babylon and the twin towers. Supposedly, the tower of babylon failed because the builders could not speak to one another.
Their logo seems to be implying that sept 11 could have been prevented with better communication and understanding of language. Like the TOB, the WTC might not have fallen if people could actually speak to one another (or gather better intelligence, or not anger other nationalities, etc, etc). The 'remember' at the bottom also seems to back this up - trying to tie the lessons of the past to the events of the present.
It's the fire-breathing cat I can't figure out.
maybe it means that through better communication the whole mess could have been avoided?
not.
so we're okay with the government reading all our transmissions now? what if instead we found out why people were willing to kill themselves for their cause, and see if we can come to any basic understandment on that level, before spending vast amounts of energy on symptoms of the basic cause?
Just think how much farther along we'd be technically (read: your life more convenient) if we devoted all the energy and capital we spend on law enforcement now, on space exploration, or virtual reality...
I've been waiting for a UT for more than 10 years, and still my overpowered PC can't put more than 80% of the words I say in standard U.S. accent english on a simple text page, even *without* trying to translate.
I'm all for what you said in that first paragraph, but are you for real? You think we should just drop all our funding for law enforcement?
"You think we should just drop all our funding for law enforcement?"
You really think a bunch of 9-5 goons are going to catch intelligent people with sophisticated funds, access to uncrackable (one type pads twinned with PGG) encryption, and who think nothing of dying for their cause? Why? The FBI only caught the Unabomber - one guy living in the same place for 15 years, with his prints/dna all over the place, because his brother turned him in. Does Bin Laden have a brother? Time to call him.
The OP was right - you`re better off trying to work out why people are so pissed.
English->Russian->English.
The Vodka is good but the meat is off.
what's that then?
english to sumerian?
*g
ed
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
The main difference is that we are morally good and they are morally bad. Their teleology is broken - they justify evil (in a utilitarian sense) acts in this world with a fantastical (i.e. not based on logic or reason, but on an arbitrary book, the Quran) idea about martyrdom and the rewards of those who kill themselves to further their own faith (often including killing those who don't practice their faith).
I think the solution of law enforcement is quite a reasonable one if you think about it. You can't force people to change belief-sets, but you can damn well tell them that if they act on their beliefs, you will kill them on the spot, and in fact, kill their neighbors, next of kin, friends and so forth. It's a defensive posture, and a fair one. If you don't like it, get the fuck off my planet, or we'll be coming for you next (yes, that means you, whiny pro-terrorist Euro-leftists).
Lightning striking the twin towers under the word Babylon... Darpa is going to a lot of trouble to draw parallels between the WTC and an unholy tower struck down by god because it displeased him. Offensive? I think so.
(Celui que tient la peur de devinir nuage)
Its comforting to see that someone with a copy of this months wired can make headlines in /. Doesn't anyone check up on this anymore? I mean i know we all must read Wired, so who let this one slip by....
Nevermind the insighfull and informative articles i have submitted, lets run with a story from page 36 of this months Wired. "Darpa: Lost in the translation"
This site is really starting to suck. And not like suck.com , more like msn.com.
"Once upon a time men were lions and machines were mice, but since it was so long ago, now its twice upon a time."
Government projects like this could fuel a recovery in the technology sector. In this "war on terrorism", the U.S. government is going to be looking for technological solutions to the various problems that will be encountered, so we will likely see more projects like this in the next year. Tech people looking for work should keep an eye on the technologies that will be needed. I found a page on Doing Business with DARPA that might be a good starting point.
One warning, however, is that working effectively with the government requires patience. A lot of what they will require will seem stupid, and you will run into plenty of clueless people along the way. However, there are some really bright technical people working for government agencies, so don't despair.
//Yes, DARPA had one really great hit [the internet] -- about 34 years ago.
let's assume for a moment that you're correct in your assertion that the internet was [d]arpa's only big win. well, hey, that's pretty big, no? and work on it certainly didn't stop 34 years ago. having the physical network running and off the ground was by no means the end of the arpanet, later the internet, project. bind, for example, was a direct result of [d]arpa funding. sure, it's not the best DNS resolver or server out there, but it does the job, and was crucial early on. [d]arpa funding for internet-related work continued for quite some time, and may still today (they've got an impressive list of projects and i didn't feel like reading through them all just to write this response).
further, and more importantly, your assertion is just false. while the internet work is certainly their highest-profile win, it's by no means the only project that's had a direct impact on our lives. all manner of research into communications systems, rocetry and propulsion, and materials sciences has led to the possability of orbital communications satalites (not to mention the more direct military applications). much advanced work in robotics, which has led to serious changes in manufacturing processes (including lowering costs for consumers and improving quality of goods), as well as (again) military and pseudo-military applications like bomb detection/disarmament. funding work in semiconductor and integrated circuit research led to the first SUN workstation at Stanford (that's what the S initially stood for) and dramatically influenced microprocessor design through today via the creation of the MIPS architecture and significant advancment of RISC architectures in general. recent research in computer vision and AI systems are resulting in unexpected gains in security applications in the private sector. current ongoing research in human vision, while already proving productive in military applications, looks quite promising for restoring normal or near-normal sight to people who suffer from various forms of serious debilitating vision impairment in the next few years.
i could go on, but i think you get the point. you wanna talk about beurocracy, fine. i agree there's likely problems that could be reasonably addressed. but DARPA remains one of the better ways the U.S. federal government spends taxpayer money. DARPA projects save lives and improve the quality of life for millions, in America and abroad. don't sell them short.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Well is suggest we take a page from South Parks Book. Describe everything and everybody using MarclarYes No???
No no, I agree with that last sentiment. It just seems like he was suggesting that all forms of law enforcement are wasteful, even domestic law enforcement. I guess I just interpreted what he said to broadly.
Just to make myself clear: I've always said we need to work out why people are so pissed off, but people usually just give me a hard time about that.
If you don't like it, get the fuck off my planet, or we'll be coming for you next (yes, that means you, whiny pro-terrorist Euro-leftists).
Yes well this would be the best solution: with enough space (and terra-forming, etc...) there wouldn't have to be any wars because you could always run away.
As for the law enforcement approach: I understand your point of view. I just don't think it will ever be as effective as dealing with the source of the anger (if you could balance stereotypes taught to children with factual counterexamples...remember blacks in this country were considered sub-human too).
So be prepared for a long, expensive, psychologoically stressful fight, my brother; which you may very well lose.
Plus (I should have incorporated this argument better into the above), the very fact that you come down so hard and seemingly arbitrarily on terrorists may engender sympathy for the terrorists behind your own lines.
In other words I predict the terrorists will win, eventually, just as the drug cartels will win, eventually.
Meanwhile the fat cats in the military-industrial complex will be the real benefitters.
It's my theory that if you let people do whatever they want (child molestation, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, publishing academic papers, whatever) in a virtual environment where no other living thing is affected (unless they want to be affected...), the need for law enforcement would be greatly reduced.
You might still have the occasional person who wouldn't be satisfied with the "virtual" environment and would want to inflict harm on real live human beings. Lock them up. But if your vr was good enough, they wouldn't be able to tell...
That's actually a pretty interesting theory. Let me sleep on it.
That wasn't sarcasm, but I think that's a little flawed. I mean, you might in theory be right, but as of now, VR is not advanced enough to effectively simulate a rape or something, so I guess for now, we'll have to stick to law enforcement.
I do like that theory though.
if the thought that law enforcement would ultimately be hardly used in a more advanced society could be introduced into the popular consciousness, instead of law enforcement being seen as inevitable and worthy even...
....If there's ever going to be any progress--
..... A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--
ok now I'm going to gratuitously quote the holy grail at great length (from www.montypython.net):
ARTHUR: Old woman!
DENNIS: Man!
ARTHUR: Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
DENNIS: I'm thirty seven.
ARTHUR: What?
DENNIS: I'm thirty seven -- I'm not old!
ARTHUR: Well, I can't just call you `Man'.
DENNIS: Well, you could say `Dennis'.
ARTHUR: Well, I didn't know you were called `Dennis.'
DENNIS: Well, you didn't bother to find out, did you?
ARTHUR: I did say sorry about the `old woman,' but from the behind you looked--
DENNIS: What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior!
ARTHUR: Well, I AM king...
DENNIS: Oh king, eh, very nice. An' how'd you get that, eh? By exploitin' the workers -- by 'angin' on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an' social differences in our society!
WOMAN: Dennis, there's some lovely filth down here. Oh -- how d'you do?
ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Who's castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.
WOMAN: Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
DENNIS: That's what it's all about if only people would--
Step one: purchase a UT-203 from Ectaco
Step two: find out which SF convention(s) Linda Park is booked at.
Step three: get a friend with a video camera.
Step four: hope you're the first in the autograph line to pull this stunt, but try to be gracious if she already has more than she can use.
Step five: Suggest ThinkGeek carry these things, if she likes it.
Best wishes,
James
that no one cares for respect anymore, only deference.
i think the question on everyones mind is; Will is translate Klingon?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You have more than one [penis]?! You lucky bastard.
It's not that uncommon for a male to have more than one joy-stick. For example: Earwigs have two penises. Sharks have a pair of "claspers". Many marsupials have a bifurcated (Y-shaped) penis, which may look like two penises. And a Google search reveals accounts of human men with two penises, and not just the common joke of "one for peeing and the other for brushing the babysitter's teeth."
Will I retire or break 10K?