'The (armed) services, after all, are extremely document-oriented organizations. That's 'too bad,' wrote Howard Shrobe, an MIT professor and former chief scientist at the Darpa division responsible for ASSIST, in an e-mail. Darpa doesn't appear to be interested, for now, in including documents in the ASSIST logs. Some researchers, however, are concerned that ASSIST may not go far enough. Eventually, it envisions using the diaries to map out cities and buildings and trade information in real time, not just after the fact. It's hard to understand the enemy's tactics.'īut Darpa believes ASSIST can do more. That can make battles difficult to reconstruct, difficult to understand and difficult to learn from. Everyone has a fragmentary insight into how the skirmish unfolded. 'In a dismounted battle, everybody has a different account of the action. It would also be a big improvement over how so-called 'after action reports' are currently handled, director John Pike noted. The proposed project is similar to digital memory efforts going on at Microsoft and elsewhere. Once the patrol was done, ASSIST would automatically pick out 'objects, scenes and activities' from the recordings, as well as identify key 'events and states.' Once all this processing was done, the data would be distilled into a 'digital report that may support later patrols and mission planning,' according to the agency.

Those sensors could be activated 'based on voluntary or involuntary physiological clues.' The GI would use a series of GPS locators, audio recorders, and video and still cameras to keep this diary. The grants will be used to develop the hardware and algorithms needed for a system that 'a dismounted soldier on a patrol' could use to record his time out in the field, according to a Darpa call for research. 'By selecting a domain in which privacy is less important (than, say, keeping the soldier alive), I think it avoids some of the nasty social stumbling blocks that tripped up LifeLog,' Karger wrote in an e-mail.ĭarpa expects to hand out four- to eight-year-long early-development contracts for ASSIST, each for $4 million or less.

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