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A Peek Inside DARPA's Current Projects
dthomas731 writes to tell us that Computerworld has a brief article on some of DARPA's current projects. From the article: "Later in the program, Holland says, PAL will be able to 'automatically watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon.' At that point, perhaps DARPA's PAL could be renamed HAL, for Hearing Assistant That Learns. The original HAL, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, tells the astronauts how it knows they're plotting to disconnect it: 'Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.'"
Here's a LOT of stuff to look through....don't tell anyone ;-)
Top Secret Stuff at DARPA. [DARPA]
It was some years ago, but I think that the book also stresses the problem for HAL in that the full mission was never revealed to the human crew, which meant that even too good thinking on their part, at the wrong point in time, would be considered a failure. HAL was programmed/ordered to obey the crew, but also respect the mission objectives, and the contradiction only grew worse.
WRT to "watch a conversation between two people and, using natural-language processing, figure out what are the tasks they agreed upon":
Here's a link to the actual research that they are likely talking about:
http://godel.stanford.edu/~niekrasz/papers/PurverE hlenEtAl06_Shallow.pdf
As you might expect, the ComputerWorld article's summary of the technology is rather optimistic. Nonetheless, this stuff really does exist, and shows some promise in both military and general applications.