Tag: DARPA

Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is the ability of a computer to recognize the spoken word.

“Alexa: read me something interesting from Innowiki.”

“Duh human, everything on Innowiki is interesting or it wouldn’t be there.”

Today, inexpensive pocket-sized phones connect to centralized servers and understand the spoken word in countless languages. Not so long ago, that was science fiction.

Background

Star Trek in 1966, The HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey of 1968, Westworld in 1973, and Star Wars in 1977 all assumed computers will understand the spoken word. What they missed is that people would become so fast at using other input devices, especially keyboards, that speaking is viewed as an inefficient input method.

The first real speech recognition actually predates science fiction ones. In 1952, three Bell Labs scientists created a system, “Audrey,” which recognized a voice speaking digits. A decade later, IBM researchers launched “Shoebox” that recognized 16 English words.

In 1971, DARPA intervened with the “Speech Understanding Research” (SUR) program aimed at a system which could understand 1,000 English words. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon created “Harpy” which understood a vocabulary comparable to a three-year-old child.

Researched continued. In the 1980s the “Hidden Markov Model” (HMM) proved a major breakthrough. Computer scientists realized computers need not understand what a person was saying but, rather, just to listen to sounds and look for patterns. By the 1990’s faster and less expensive CPUs brought speech recognition to the masses with software like Dragon Dictate. Bell South created the voice portal phone-tree system which, unfortunately, frustrates and annoys people to this day.

DARPA stepped back in during the 2000s, sponsoring multi-language speech recognition systems.

Rapid Advancement

However, a major breakthrough came from the private sector. Google released a service called “Google 411” allowing people to dial Google and lookup telephone numbers for free. People would speak to a computer that would guess what they said then an operator would answer, check the computer’s accuracy, and delivered the phone number. The real purpose of the system was to better train computers with a myriad of voices, including difficult-to-decipher names. Eventually, this evolved into Google’s voice recognition software still in use today.

Speech recognition continues to advance in countless languages. Especially for English, the systems are nearing perfection. They are fast, accurate, and require relatively little computer processing power.

In 2019 anybody can speak to a computer though unless their hands are busy doing something else, most prefer not to.

Computer Assisted Design (Sketchpad)

“The cinema camera doesn’t make movies; it allows movies to be made. It’s the creative people who make it real to people.”

Ivan Sutherland

Computer Assisted Design (CAD) uses mathematics to do the geometry and calculations necessary to draw and design. CAD is faster and more accurate than hand drawing.

Sutherland’s “sketchpad” software, part of his doctoral thesis, was the first CAD program. Literally, decades ahead of its time, Sketchpad enabled a user to tell a computer how to draw, place, and move geometric shapes.

Explanation of Sketchpad

As a professor at various University’s Sutherland became a “Johnny Appleseed” of modern computer science. Eventually, he influenced and trained countless computer scientists who went on to make groundbreaking innovations.

A small number of notable Sutherland students include:

  • Alan Kay, inventor of object-oriented programming and the single-person modern computer (Xerox PARC).
  • Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape).
  • John Warnock, inventor of PostScript, PDF, and co-inventor of spline fonts (Xerox PARC, Adobe).
  • Edwin Catmull, texture mapping and computer-animation pioneer (Pixar).
  • Bob Sproull, virtual reality.
  • Gordon Romney, 3D rendering.
  • Frank Crow, antialiasing.

No computer or business historian would argue that Sutherland is not one of, if not the most important, seminal scientists responsible for the modern computer.      

Eventually, in 1964, Sutherland stepped away from academia and replaced J.C.R. Licklider as head of DARPA, during the time that DARPA invented the internet.

Demonstration of Sketchpad

Autonomous Vehicles (Self-Driving Cars)

DARPA, the US government agency that invented the internet (among other things) created a contest to build a self-driving car.

The first DARPA Grand Challenge, in 2004, was a 150 mile (240 km. route). The robot-car that drove the furthest before breaking down, built by Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), lasted 11.78km.

Undeterred, DARPA tried again. Subsequently, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge involved driving about 132 miles (212km) autonomously. Five cars finished, with Stanford coming in first. By 2007, DARPA issued their third and final challenge, to navigate the streets of a fake city. Carnegie Mellon won.

Sebastian Thrun, Stanford’s team lead, and Red Whittaker, of CMU, were former colleagues and friendly rivals. Autonomous cars built by their students repeatedly came in first or second in the various challenges.

Google/Waymo

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin attended the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge in disguise. They soon after hired Thrun. Initially, most analysts assumed Google would lean on his expertise in artificial intelligence – the core of a self-driving car – to improve the core Google search engine. However, the company eventually built out a separate business for self-driving cars. In late 2016 Google spun the self-driving car division into its own company, Waymo.

By 2018 Waymo was testing self-driving cars, albeit with safety drivers, around Phoenix. By late 2018, they commercialized the service. In 2019, Waymo announced plans to build an auto plant in Michigan to convert ordinary cars to autonomous vehicles to scale up their AV taxi service.

Today, every automaker is working furiously to perfect self-driving technology for cars, busses, and trucks.

Modern Computing v1: The Mother of All Demos.

On December 9, 1968, the modern world was born.

Background

Douglas Engelbart, working for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) showed the future of modern computing to a roomful of people that, for the most part, understood virtually none of it.

In a tour de force, Engelbart introduced the world to video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, copy and paste, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, and collaborative real-time editing.

Additionally, he also demonstrated a new type of input device, a block of wood that tracked hand movement and had only three buttons. His team referred to it as a mouse, a name that stuck. Surprisingly, they worked with the computer interactively, rather than running a program with a set of data that then produced a result or stored the data on tape. Interactive computing was rare but not unheard of: Sutherland’s Sketchpad program was interactive.

Officially, Engelbart presented a paper entitled A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect. Unofficially, Engelbart referred to it as The Mother of All Demos.

Engelbart’s mentors included computer visionaries J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and Larry Roberts, all working for DARPA. Eventually, Robert Taylor would go on to lead the development of similar work at Xerox PARC.

Reception

During the demo, about 1,000 computer scientists gathered in Melo Park, California. Markedly, two computers were networked together, one running the demo and another back at the office. With each innovation, Sutherland announced “Look what else we can do here,” a theme Apple’s Steve Jobs would pick up decades later as “Just one more thing.”

The vast majority used computers with punch cards in their daily lives. They watched Engelbart and, according to him, filed out without asking a question or saying a word. To computer scientists of this era, the technology looked more science fiction than anything real. Surprisingly to Engelbart, they weren’t sure what anybody would do with it.

Engelbart introduces and demonstrates videoconferencing

Engelbart’s research was sponsored by the Advanced Research Project Agency (the precursor to DARPA), NASA, and the US Air Force.

Most of Engelbart’s innovations lay in the lab until adopted first by Xerox PARC and, eventually, by Apple, Microsoft, and countless others. Engelbart never embraced the idea of individual personal computers — he preferred large central computers — and declined to participate in future work.

The Mother of All Demos