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Department of Defense Gadget Show
blackp writes "DefenseLINK has an article about Force Protection Equipment Demonstration IV. This year they had over 2,600 gadget and equipment for defense and government agencies. The list includes kevlar suits, body heat camo, a RoBoCop Suit, even biometric identification. Some pictures are available, although somewhat limited. This show seems perfect for the geek with a big budget." Or the government with a big budget. Still, some neat things on display.
This year's one day seminar on Integrating Speech Technology in Language Learning has been cancelled. The InSTIL seminar was all that had been left of what was once a funded U.S. research program to use speech recognition to help people learn to read. However, over the past few years the budget of the Interagency Educational Research Initiative has been slashed and the Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership program has been ZEROED. The IERI and LAAP programs were created to deal with DARPA funding deficencies, but DARPA has not taken up the slack for speech recognition in language instruction. Fewer U.S. polyglots will have a far greater impact on intelligence-gathering efforts than bandaids like Project Babylon or any of the DARPA advanced speech recognition programs can possibly provide. Please join me in asking John Poindexter and his advisory board and NIST to help get this vital funding back in the budget.
Also, the Linguistic Data Consortium sent their catalog update out yesterday. As usual, there are no new corpi of people attempting to read a language as they are acquiring it, at any age.
Luckily they're just misusing the term to refer to a bomb squad blast armor that's also a biological/chemical suit. Nothing really new, just the combination of two old technologies.
Now, when they take that same suit, add in hydraulic strength multipliers and an advanced HUD, I'll be worried. Unless I get there first.
My company was there this year and a couple years ago (we do risk management software). The show is quite interesting because it's a good mix of technologies, from Jersey barriers to bullet-proof glass to software. It's also not just a cheesy trade show, but some serious display by both commercial companies and Gov't agencies. The site for the show is here.
The coolest technology was a compressed-air powered bullet for training. Police and military can use their service weapons to basically play paintball. It's nice because the feel of the weapon is exactly what it would be in real-life situations instead of them having to use a fake training weapon with different characteristics.
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...I know because I've gone to it before. I went while I was stationed at Quantico. They hold every year at the airfield (home to HMX-1, the President's helo pilots and the only experimental helo squadron in the Marine Corps, thus the "X" in their name).
To understand the purpose of the show, you need a little context about what happens at Quantico. It's the home to all Marine Corps doctrine, experimentation, and development. Yes, those may be done in other places, but the commands that control them are all in Quantico. It is also home to the FBI and DEA Academies. Many of the other services have similar setups around the D.C. area. So, Quantico is the ideal location for this sort of thing.
The show's purpose is to let the people who make R&D and purchasing decisions to see what's coming down the pipeline from various companies. Some are things that companies would like to see the military or law enforcement test (and eventually adopt) others are things that are in the military pipeline for deployment and are being showcased. The show let someone see a new product and decide that it is something they'd like to test. They can then acquire some, give them a whirl, and recommend the product if they like it. It also lets you see what's crap. I remeber a Tawainese company that was making a futuristic rifle and had it at the show. The thing looked freaking awesome, until you picked it up. It was heavy as hell & shoddily made ("Should the upper reciever be rattling on this thing?" "Ah yes - that is because our rifle is so flexible!").
In many ways it's very much like a computer trade show. You wander around & hear the sales pitch, try things out, and get lots of free crap. Except instead of getting a hard-on looking at IBM's newest server line, you get the hard-on playing with H&K's newest sidearm.