Echelon computers can't cope with bad lines Who remembers Echelon, the top-secret telecommunications spy network said to be run by the US and allied Anglophone nations, and to be triggered as soon as certain key words or phrases are spoken on the phone? A lot of you, we'd guess. So it's interesting to note that Pentagon boffins have now stated that perhaps the most …
Oooooooooooh yes.
:-)
Incidentally, I think this could possibly be an attempt to downplay capacity. You see, the NSA is now "helping" Google "with China" - you can say what you want about Google, but they appear to be damn good at writing analysers. I think this collaboration may thus actually be the other way round..
...defeated by anyone with half a brian...
"tell on its own whether they are speech or something else such as music"
So just put a four on the flor and add sing it.
If you're angry and you know it, blow it up
If you're angry and you know it, blow it up
If your really, really angry and you really, really want to show it,
blow up the 5.15 to paddington on tuesdaaaaaaaayyyyy.
..my dog.
No matter what the background noise level, or the age and gender of the speaker, my doggie can hear the word "Cookie," and come running for a treat.
My GF, has an even larger recognition database, and reacts similarly to "Fry's,*" "Tiffany's," "Buffet," Etc., through all kinds of audio clutter.
What makes a human or dog better at this task? Massively parallel processing. Your ear has a separate receptor for each frequency, and embedded processing to correlate the harmonics.
A similar approach in hardware should solve the problem.
DARPA: just send the money to my Paypal Account...
....and I'll rent you my dog.
*Fry's is a ginormous electronics retailer here in Vegas.
...as a family owned grocery store, which by importing workers instead of exporting jobs, had a huge chain in the california market.
When the family sold the business, none of the by then 250 or so key professionals wanted to work for the new owners, but they had a non-compete in the food business.
So they kept the family team together, and used their food marketing skills for electronics. Their 8 page color ads looked just like a supermarket ad; today, their great color section is the reason to buy the friday paper.
On the other hand, the GF points out to me that stuff from Tiffany and Co. takes MUCH less storage space. She also asks DARPA to hurry with that money.
Getting back to the problam, by working in the frequency domain, using several thousand mechanical resonators and neural logic should yield a noise tolerant trainable word discriminator.
Higher throughput can be obtained by overclocking, the upper limit being determined by the ability to construct small resonant structures and thermal noise, whichever comes first.
During initial trials the voice recognition package failed to perform up to spec on noisy lines. Everyone involved knew it. but there was nothing better, and their still isn't (unbelievably).
That's not to say it doesn't work at all, and the level of line noise required to really screw the system up is far higher than many of the young people reading this who grew up using digital telecoms have ever heard.
The DARPA project is really more of an upgrade, not a replacement.
can it understand Geordie?
<start-translation>
Hoo ye gannin, hinny? Whey aye, man.
Give ower, y'a kiddin!
An Alfie Hotching to Bizzies?
Ya tarkin sh*te, Hadaway man.
Ootside!
</end-translation>
*** DOES NOT COMPUTE ***
*** DOES NOT COMPUTE ***
si_signo [3]: SIGQUIT 3* quit
si_errno [0]: Error 0
si_code [0]: SI_USER [pid: 11927, uid: 26432]
stackbase=EE292000, stackpointer= EE291878
Full thread dump:
"Thread-5" (TID:0xee703b78, sys_thread_t:0xee261db8, state:R) prio=5
mythread.stopper(exec3.java:10)
mythread.run(exec3.java:16)
"Thread-4" (TID:0xee703bb8, sys_thread_t:0xee291db8, state:R) prio=5 *current thread*
mythread.stopper(exec3.java:10)
mythread.run(exec3.java:16)
We used to use the M-x spook command in emacs to include a paragraph of randomised so-called hit words in our emails to trigger these internet-connected Echelon systems. For example:
# Croatian nuclear FBI colonel plutonium Ortega Waco, Texas Panama CIA DES jihad fissionable quiche terrorist World Trade Center
# assassination DES NORAD Delta Force Waco, Texas SDI explosion Serbian Panama Uzi Ft. Meade SEAL Team 6 Honduras PLO NSA
The idea being that if you had enough of these messages intercepted each day, it would tie up so many human beings to separate the false positives from the real intel that they would have to give up. Arguably, PGP and other systems may be doing the same, which is why using both M-x spook *and* PGP together can be so much fun!!
Mine's the tinfoil-lined one..
AC because, well, because!
Was Echelon really ever about real-time speech recognition? I doubt it. Most of the power would have surely come the enveloper - from knowing who was phoning who, from where and when. If a chap you suspect to be a religious fundamentalist phones a chap you suspect to be a passport forger, then that is surely already enough to flag up the communication as worthy of further investigation, without having to pick out key words or whole conversations.
There are some ways to create a system that given a set of very committed and precise inputs (game pieces on a game board) that can "learn" to play a simple game like chess or backgammon. But these are things that we know how to express mathematically.
We don't really understand how audio/visual processing works in the human brain. We can't program a computer to do something we can't break down into algorithms even if we had cheap super computers with millions of parallel processors.
Go tell the enemies to walk into a room or basement aht isn't being bombed and has good connection! Hahahahahaha
In all seriousness just start recording speech with static in the background
So example A would be perfect dictation in a noise free environment and the dictation software is designed for that environment.
example B the dictation software will be designed to understand voices only in high winds and this software would fail to recognise any speech in a silent noise free room.
example C the dictation software will be designed to record speech in war environments only.
etc etc...
Yes so test example C by speakign while playing COD4.........easy.
If these kinds of things catch anyone it's probably someone who is so stupid they can't even set fire to their own crotch in their own bed room let alone set fire to their pants on a plane.
Why are my subs always so rubbish? == It's time to blow up kings cross
Really? Why not try the bacon! == I agree brother, the infidels will die!
I havn't tried that, I think I'll try tommorow! == Yes muhahahahahahahahaaa
And I'd spend my weekends baking for the local Church bake sale.
This is funny news. As anyone who has tried to make a phone call from certain areas (uzbekistan, afghanistan etc) the phone lines are notoriously noisy. Even some of the later siemens and alcatel equipment still goes over dodgy old russian lines which introduces all kinds of interesting things to your conversation. Ive even had a 4 way conversation, half in english, half in russian with all four of us having no idea why we are on the same line. SS7 it most certainly aint.
Google "Blackboard systems" or "Hearsay" for further details.
Note this was regard to speech understanding and ran offline (using IIRC a DEC PDP10, roughly 10 hrs to process 5 minutes of sampled speech).
No doubt custom hardware and faster processing has speeded up things quite a lot.
I suspect random noise (of the type common on analogue phone lines) was a pretty big problem.
Mine will be the one with "Blackboard Systems" in the
Bit of trivia here, but playing the radio or CD in the background won't work. All UK radio transmissions have to be recorded, so all they need to do is get hold of the recording and subtract it from the waveform - cancels out the radio and you get a nice clean sample.
Osama will have to make his next phone call with his henchmen belting out a barbers-shop quartet in the background.
So while Google, recently partnering with the NSA, makes steady progress improving its voice to text/voice recognition services, ...
And at the same time the Dept of Justice is arguing in a federal appeals court that citizens don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, with regard to both content and location, on mobile phones because they've seen movies where the gov't eavesdrops on mobile phones ...
Darpa jumps up and says don't worry, none of that stuff really works anyways?
umm... color me skeptical.
Ref Echelon:
Go and download as much data on "Echelon" for free from the CIA website public domain and also the EU parliament website public domain. Takes a while to find but its there.
Echelon was panned by the EU parliament years ago when the US was accused of allegedly using Echelon to gain the upper hand in international business deals, something the US strenuously denies.
Echelon has since been embraced by the EU and become an integral part of the EU security policy. Echelon used to scan the EU from British NSA bases.
Check the CIA and EU websites for this and more data on Echelon, its all there.
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