QUEST Discussion Topics
1 June 2012
1.) The first topic is the discussion associated with a QUEST based venture fund proposal. We want to discuss the aspects of originality of the research including the potential impact to the AF --- possibly with a CHLOE twist; Quality of research to include methodology, research objectives transition plan; Work plan – our plan to generate this;
2.) The second topic is a result of a mid-week meeting with Ox and Mark
Derriso. His architecture generated a discussion on situational awareness.
So I want to return to a discussion on awareness versus consciousness and how we want to use those terms. Specifically I want to propose a new term which may be the basis of our topic one proposal – “Situational
Consciousness” vs Situational awareness.
News Stories
1.
Nuance Voice Recognition http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40327/?p1=BI
Voice-controlled interfaces are showing up in mobile phones, TVs, and automobiles. One company believes it can give just about everything a voice… growing number of people now talk to their mobile smart phones, asking them to send e-mail and text messages, search for directions, or find information on the Web…"We're at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront," says Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer of Nuance Communications, a company based in Burlington,
Massachusetts, that dominates the market for speech recognition with its Dragon software and other products. "I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface."… thanks in part to steady progress in the technologies needed to help machines understand human speech, including
machine learning and statistical data-mining techniques…rapid rise of powerful mobile devices is making voice interfaces even more useful and pervasive… "The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just

couldn't do before," says Glass. "You can use more sophisticated statistical models."… Nuance is at the heart of the boom in voice technology. The company was founded in 1992 as Visioneer and has acquired dozens of other voice technology businesses. It now has more than 6,000 staff members at 35 locations around the world, and its revenues in the second quarter of 2012 were $390.3 million, a 22.4
percent increase over the same period in 2011…Nuance has deftly applied its expertise in voice recognition to the emerging market for speech interfaces. The company supplies voice recognition technology to many other companies and is widely believed to provide the speech component of Siri… Inspired by the success of voice recognition software on mobile phones, Nuance hope to put its speech interfaces in many more places, most notably the television
and the automobile. Both are popular and ripe for innovation…At
Nuance's research labs, Sejnoha demonstrated software called
Dragon TV running on a television in a mocked-up living room. When a colleague said, "Dragon TV, find movies starring Meryl Streep," the interface instantly scanned through channel listings to select several appropriate movies. A version of this technology is already in some televisions sold by Samsung… Apple is widely rumored to be developing its own television, and it's speculated that Siri will be its controller… the Sync entertainment system in Ford automobiles already uses Nuance's technology to let drivers pull up directions,
weather information, and songs. About four million Ford cars on the road have Sync with voice recognition. Last week, Nuance introduced software called Dragon Drive that will let other car manufacturers add voice-control features to vehicles …Nuance makes a number of software development kits available to anyone who wants to include voice recognition technology in an application. Montrue
Technologies, a company based in Ashland, Oregon, used Nuance's mobile medical SDK to develop an iPad app that lets physicians dictate notes…
2.
Space plane http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/05/30/air-force-secretive-x-
37b-space-plane-will-land-soon/

After more than a year in space, the U.S. Air Force's secretive robotic space plane, the X-37B, is coming down soon…craft’s touchdown "is expected to occur during the early- to mid-June timeframe."… space plane now circling Earth is the second spacecraft of its kind built for the Air Force by Boeing’s Phantom Works. What payload the X-37B is carrying is classified, and the mission is being carried out by the Air
Force Rapid Capabilities Office… Each X-37B space plane is about 29 feet (8.8 meters) long and 15 feet (4.5 m) wide. The vehicle has a payload bay about the size of a pickup truck bed and is outfitted with a deployable solar panel to generate power… According to General
William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, the current mission of high-flying X-37B space plane has been a huge success… Shelton praised the long-duration mission of the craft,
which far surpasses its 270-day baseline design specifications…"The
X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, or OTV, is a non-operational system that will demonstrate a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Air Force . The objectives of the OTV program include space experimentation, risk reduction and a concept of operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies."….
3.
Back door in computer chip used in military systems http://times247.com/articles/boeing-787-chip-s-back-doorheightens-cyber-attack-concerns#ixzz1wM0CTzim
Two Cambridge experts have discovered a "back door" in a computer chip used in military systems and aircraft such as the
Boeing 787 that could allow the chip to be taken over via the internet… discovery will heighten concerns about the risks of cyberattacks on sensitive installations…discovered a method that a hacker can use to connect to the internals of a chip made by Actel, a US manufacturer…
4.
NATO Al-qaeda strike http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/afghanistan/story/2012-05-
29/afghanistan-nato-al-qaeda/55257424/1

U.S.-led NATO force in Afghanistan killed al-Qaeda's second-highest leader in the country in an airstrike in eastern Kunar province…Sakhr al-Taifi, also known as Mushtaq and Nasim, was responsible for commanding foreign insurgents in Afghanistan and directing attacks against NATO and Afghan forces…frequently traveled between
Afghanistan and Pakistan, carrying out commands from senior al-
Qaeda leadership and ferrying in weapons and fighters…airstrike that killed al-Taifi and another al-Qaeda militant took place Sunday in
Kunar's Watahpur district…
5.
Obama’s use of drones http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-inwar-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=2&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret
“nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical… Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war… describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing… the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan… What
remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough….
6.
Strengths in links in social networks http://www.technologyreview.com/web/40456/?p1=A2
Bangalore-based Hachi connects the dots between your socialnetwork contacts and recommends the best "people path" to someone new… Friend of a friend: Hachi wants to help users connect with new people by scoring the strength of relationships in different social chains connecting them… On LinkedIn, you can see several degrees of connections between yourself and others to facilitate this

process. But some introductions are bound to be better than others, simply because of the relationships between the people making them….
Hachi. The company was created by Rachna Singh, a former
Silicon Valley resident who spent a decade working in sales and business development. Singh was constantly searching for ways to get good introductions to new folks by working contacts peppered across different social networks, and via contacts in her Gmail and
Outlook e-mail accounts, as well as on her smart phone…Singh built
Hachi to be a sort of social networking GPS—a service that shows the best path for reaching out to a new contact… site, now in a private beta test, does this by measuring the strength of relationships in the path from you to your desired contact. If you search for a person or company on Hachi, the site will comb your connected networks (currently limited to LinkedIn, Twitter, and
Facebook) and return a number of possible "people paths" you
could follow to get from point A to point B. Each path comes with a score of 1 to 10 based on how well each person in the chain knows the people they're connected to along the chain—the higher the number, the more confident Hachi is that you'll be able to follow that path to reach the person you're after…Hachi shows me a tiny profile for each person along these paths, and if I click on little arrows at the bottom of each person's profile, I can see a bit more information…Early adopters are mainly taking to Hachi for business purposes—networking, sales, and recruiting are among the popular
uses—but Singh hopes users will find other purposes for it, such as finding dates…
7.
Detecting frustration http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27876/?p1=blog s training a feature-detecting algorithm to decompose subjects' facial
expressions into individual "action units," M. Ehsan Hoque of the
MIT Media Lab discovered not only that smiling is quite common when test subjects are frustrated, but also that software is better than humans at differentiating frustration smiles from happiness smiles… "For frustrated smiles, humans performed below chance,

whereas the algorithm did better than 90 percent," says
Hoque…Subjects' frustration smiles included activation of the groups of facial muscles known as action unit 12, or raising of the corners of the lips, as well as action unit 6, in which cheeks are raised….