Monday, August 11, 2008

BBN pulls in $4.4M defense contract

By Mass High Tech Staff

BBN Technologies Corp. reports it has landed a $4.4 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Under the deal, the company will work on the Scalable Network Monitoring program, intended to develop alert systems for threats to computer networks. BBN said it will develop scalable attack detection algorithms, a flexible and extensible architecture for implementing and deploying the algorithms, and an execution environment for traffic inspection, feature extraction and algorithm execution.

Last month, BBN won a $12 million grant from the National Science Foundation to design and construct prototypes of IT infrastructure that support network sciences and engineering experiments. BBN said the GENI network infrastructure would enable researchers from multiple disciplines to avoid the limitations of Internet-circumscribed research environments. Also in July BBN won $5 million in additional funding by the U.S. Department of Defense for a speech transcription program, originally awarded in a $13 million contract in January.  

In June, the Cambridge company bought California-based engineering firm Digital Force Technologies LLC for an undisclosed amount. Digital Force was most well known for developing small electronic devices for surveillance, reconnaissance and communication in challenging environments for U.S. government customers, BBN said.

Also in June, the Cambridge-based company won a $73.8 million contract from the U.S. Army for thousands of its new Boomerang wearable shot-detection systems, and a $13.6 million contract from the Office of Naval Research for virtual game-based learning intended for Navy and Marine use.

Founded in 1948, BBN is well-known for its role in the development of the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet. BBN specializes in acoustic technology, speech recognition, secure computing and data mining.