BALTIMORE
Johns Hopkins University has received a grant from the Department of Defense to develop computer systems to assist military and intelligence agencies process the huge amounts of data they collect.
The $48 million grant will be used for a new research center. It will emphasize improving technology to translate and analyze speech and text in several languages, school officials said on Monday.
The center will assist overworked intelligence analysts deal with the flood of information often in Arabic being collected in Iraq and the war on terror, experts said.
The center will be called the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence. It will be located near Hopkins’ Homewood campus, and staff will include engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, cognitive scientists and linguists.
“It’s really supposed to be a fresh look at this problem,” said Gary W. Strong, the center’s executive director. “This technology has hit a wall at this point.”
Strong was formerly a program manager at the National Science Foundation, where he focused on language technology projects.
