An online encyclopedia that writes itself
June 26, 2012 | Source: Technology Review
(Credit: DARPA)
They look a bit like communally written Wikipedia pages. But these articles — concise profiles of people and organizations, complete with lists of connected organizations, people, and events — were in fact written by computers, in a new bid by the Pentagon to build machines that can follow global news events and provide intelligence analysts with useful summaries in close to real time.
The prototype system is part of a nonpublic site built for intelligence agencies by Raytheon BBN in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and scheduled for delivery to the government later this year. It gathers information from 40 news websites written in English, Chinese, and Arabic, and eventually it will cover hundreds of news sites in all major languages. Ultimately the system will be linked with an existing TV broadcast monitoring network.
The system captures everything that appears on news sites and constantly and automatically adds information, says Sean Colbath, a senior scientist at BBN Technologies who helped develop the technology. ”
It starts by detecting an “entity” — a name or an organization, such as Boko Haram, accounting for a variety of spellings. Then it identifies other entities (events and people) that are connected to it, along with statements made by and about the subject. “It’s automatically extracting relationships between entities,” Colbath says. “Here the machine has learned, by being given examples, how to put these relationships together and fill in those slots for you.
The BBN project is the fruit of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s latest effort to build machines that read as humans do, a decades-old problem that has been the focus of increasing research in recent years. Under DARPA’s research program, prototypes have been built by SRI International and IBM as well as Raytheon BBN.
Comments (7)
by Deavman
“A few years back, initiatives like this would likely have been completely clandestine and kept that way for decades.”
Actually since it no longer kept clandestine after just a few years, it couldn’t possibly “kept that way for decades” .
by MikeB
Interesting but only workable if sources are understood. Published yesterday was an article arguing that state run news media from China, Middle East, and Russia is expanding while traditional Western news agencies are contracting. It follows then that US intelligence can then be coopted by foreign interests simply manipulating the information absorbed by this system. The link is:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/world-view/as-western-media-contract-the-china-daily-expands/article4367720/
by GatorALLin
skynet says…Your Welcome….
by eldras
Whoooa Brilliant. Roll on A.I.
by ze liu
You forgot 7) they already have much more advanced versions and this is just to mislead their competitors.
by Snaz
Actually, after a moment to thing about it, it’s remarkable we live in society where this DARPA information is available to everyone, everywhere. A few years back, initiatives like this would likely have been completely clandestine and kept that way for decades. Perhaps it’s a sign that either 1) we really value openness in modern society, 2) we trust our ability to stay ahead of the competition, 3) are overconfident, 4) expect some politician will leak it for personal gain at some point anyway, 5) think there is no way to keep “the other guys” from hacking us and learning about it regardless, or 6) trying to score some points before Google introduces their own version next year.
by spikosauropod
Snaz :
A few years back, initiatives like this would likely have been completely clandestine and kept that way for decades.
You assume they are showing you the big stuff. Maybe what you actually see is just nothing.