Those kooky, possibly-creepy defense programs are awfully hard to kill. Take LifeLog, Darpa's controversial project to archive almost everything about people -- where they've gone, what they've said, how they're feeling. The agency seemed to pull the plug on the program, after some pesky reporters started looking into it. But seven months later, large portions of the electronic diary effort were back, under a new name: Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology, or ASSIST.
Now, Darpa is showing its LifeLog ASSIST handywork off, at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Soldiers there, wearing a ton of cameras and sensors, are going on mock-patrol through a simulated Iraqi village -- and recording the whole thing.
The sensors are expected to capture, classify and store such data as the sound of acceleration and deceleration of vehicles, images of people (including suspicious movements that might not be seen by the soldiers), speech and specific types of weapon fire.
A capacity to give GPS locations, an ability to translate Arabic signs and text into English, as well as on-command video recording also are being demonstrated in Aberdeen. Sensor system software is expected to extract keywords and create an indexed multimedia representation of information collected by different soldiers. For comparison purposes, the soldiers wearing the sensors will make an after-action report based on memory and then supplement that after-action report with information learned from the sensor data.
(Big ups: Boing Boing)
