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BBN Technologies Inc. has landed $29.7 million from the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer system able to read prose and convert it to information understandable by an artificial intelligence.
Under the deal, Cambridge-based BBN will develop a prototype machine reading system. BBN will be working under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s machine reading program.
Last week, BBN announced it had won $11.3 million from DARPA to develop cheaper wireless network technology. The technology is intended to be affordable and rapidly deployable. The project, called Wireless Network after Next (WNaN), is administered by the Air Force Research Laboratory, and is intended to provide the military with the ability to communicate with every soldier and every device at all operational levels.
In March, BBN won $4 million in two contracts from DARPA and the U.S. Army.
DARPA gave BBN $2.8 million in additional funding under the federal Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program. The TRANSTAC program is aimed at developing two-way translation systems that enable speakers of different languages to communicate with one another spontaneously in real-world, tactical situations. With the funding, BBN will focus on improvements in machine translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and the system architecture.
The Army gave BBN won a $1.2 million contract from the U.S. Army systems to monitor foreign media broadcasts. BBN will deliver a pair of turn-key multimedia monitoring systems to the Army, capable of monitoring broadcast news from television, satellite radio and the web.
Known widely for developing part of the forerunner network to the Internet, BBN is a 60 year-old firm with 700 employees in Cambridge, Middletown, R.I., and five U.S. facilities outside New England.
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