Military looks to enhance laptop translators
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 14, 2006
One day, a U.S. soldier entering tense situations without the assistance of an Arabic interpreter might rely on two-way translation software in mobile computers.
This year the military’s Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC’s speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker’s response and utters it in English.
If the software is uncertain about what one party said, it presents choices on the computer screen for the speaker to choose.
The military has had variations on this. Troops in Afghanistan had a gadget called the Phraselator that could speak a list of commonly useful phrases such as “get out of the car.”
But the newer software can facilitate two-way conversations not limited to pre-chosen phrases. Recently the Joint Forces Command began testing one such system, known as IraqComm and produced by SRI International, on about 30 computers. Now the military is announcing a similar experiment is underway with software known as MASTOR from IBM Corp.
MASTOR’s accuracy is not perfect, but “you can communicate a concept and you can elicit a response from someone” – a huge improvement for U.S. troops who rarely have an Arabic linguist on hand, said David Nahamoo, chief of language technologies at IBM Research.
No such luck, Hormel: The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to claim the word as a trademark for unsolicited e-mails.
EU trademark officials rejected Hormel Foods Corp.’s appeal, dealing the company another setback in its struggle to prevent software companies from using the word “spam” in their products, a practice it argued was diluting its brand name.
The European Office of Trade Marks and Designs, noting that the vast majority of the hits yielded by a Google search for the word made no reference to the food, said that “the most evident meaning of the term SPAM for the consumers … will certainly be unsolicited, usually commercial e-mail, rather than a designation for canned spicy ham.”
The word Spam – short for “Spiced Ham” – was coined by Hormel in 1937 as part of a marketing campaign so successful the word became virtually synonymous with canned meat.
Its use to describe unwanted electronic communication is a reference to the popular 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy sketch in which Vikings in a diner repeatedly drown out conversation with the chant “Spam! Spam! Spam!”
Xbox going on the road: Microsoft Corp., which has said it wants to interest a broader audience in its Xbox video-game console, is launching a promotional tour to publicize Xbox features that let parents restrict access to certain games.
Microsoft’s 20-city bus tour will include visits to Boys &Girls Club of America locations. Microsoft is donating an Xbox 360 to each club it visits, and the youth organization has agreed to put promotional materials about the parental controls in the clubs on the tour.
Like most consoles, the core audience for Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360 are teenage boys and young adult males. But the Redmond software company is hoping eventually to also attract other users, such as younger siblings and parents.
Put in your two cents worth: A childhood photograph of a man with a mother he hasn’t spoken with in 20 years, an Argentinean’s proclamation of his love for “The Simpsons” and a tune from the Boston punk band Darkbuster are among the early submissions to Yahoo Inc.’s digital time capsule.
The company is accepting words, pictures, videos, sounds and drawings from anyone around the world. It plans to seal about 5 terabytes of data – equivalent to the text of roughly 5 million books – until the company’s 25th anniversary in 2020.
“What we’re basically trying to do is create a shared digital mosaic of our time by allowing users to define what’s important to them,” said Bill Gannon, the company’s editorial director. “We’ve seen prayers, haiku, poems, a lot of digital photographs and video is starting to come in.”
Once sealed, the data will be given to the Smithsonian Institution’s Folkways Recordings project, with backup copies kept by Yahoo and others. It won’t be publicly available until 2020.
The project, however, won’t try to preserve today’s computers and software to read that data. Gannon said he’s counting on tomorrow’s software being able to convert today’s document formats should any change over the next 14 years.
That may be an optimistic proposition given how quickly software makers come up with new versions, making small changes along the way such that characters and line breaks no longer display correctly. Among larger projects, NASA’s early space records and the British Broadcasting Corp.’s digital collection of life in 1986 are rapidly losing the equipment to read the data.
Stay south of the border: The Mexican government is setting up an international network of Mexican professionals to combat a brain drain to the United States and create homegrown technology companies.
Candido Morales, director of the government’s Institute for Mexicans Living Abroad, said the Talent Network project aims to facilitate well-paid jobs in Mexico by tapping into the experience of highly educated Mexicans living and working overseas.
According to studies by U.S. and Mexican immigration experts, almost one-third of Mexicans with postgraduate degrees live north of the border, many of them working in the technology sector.
“We’d like to create a system so they can share their talents with people back in Mexico,” Morales said.
Morales said he does not expect the professionals to return to Mexico to run companies. Rather, he said, they can advise and train local entrepreneurs and invest from abroad in what could become Mexican equivalents of IBM Corp., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. or Microsoft Corp.
The Talent Network has already met twice, in Mexico City and in San Jose, Calif.
