- It's been seven months since the Pentagon pulled the
plug on LifeLog, its controversial project to archive almost everything
about a person. But now, the Defense Department seems ready to revive large
portions of the program under a new name.
-
- Using a series of sensors embedded in a GI's gear, the
Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology, or ASSIST,
project
aims to collect what a soldier sees, says and does in a combat zone --
and then to weave those events into digital memories, so commanders can
have a better sense of how the fight unfolded.
-
- That's similar to what planners at Darpa, the Pentagon's
research arm, had in mind for LifeLog, its ambitious electronic diary
effort.
However, ASSIST's aspirations are more modest, its battlefield focus is
clearer, and its privacy concerns are more manageable, military analysts
and computer scientists say. All of that combines to give the project a
better chance of taking off where LifeLog crashed.
-
- "Welcome to the wacky ways of contracting at the
Defense Department. If it doesn't fly the first time around, you can be
sure it'll be back. And so it is," said Steven Aftergood, an analyst
with the Federation of American Scientists. "This time around, though,
the work has a slightly more plausible context. And more of an effort has
been made to connect it to a military application."
-
- Under the old Darpa program, every aspect of a life was
fair game -- not just what was heard or said, but what e-mails were sent,
what meals were bought and what TV shows were watched. Privacy advocates
wondered how all that information was going to be used.
-
- Darpa, in return, had a slew of answers. In a program
overview, the agency suggested that the program could offer a way to create
a computerized assistant for battlefield commanders. Darpa said the project
could also provide a means to "support medical research and the early
detection of an emerging epidemic."
-
- That fuzziness set off alarm bells for civil liberties
advocates, particularly because LifeLog came on the heels of Total
Information
Awareness, Darpa's unnervingly far-reaching effort to use ordinary
citizens'
records to profile potential terrorists. At first, the only people wearing
the electronic diaries would have been those scientists developing LifeLog.
Nevertheless, critics like The New York Times' William Safire were still
concerned. LifeLog researchers might be comfortable recording their own
actions. But what about the other people that the LifeLoggers are
"looking
at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world?"
Safire wondered.
-
- ASSIST may run into similar hurdles.
-
- Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, notes that "I don't see anything about privacy in this
(call for research) other than a note about privacy regulations in
testing."
-
- But the ASSIST project's explicit battlefield focus
should
ease some of the privacy concerns, said David Karger, an artificial
intelligence
specialist at MIT. LifeLog's tests were supposed to take place during
researchers'
trips to Washington, D.C. ASSIST's evaluations, on the other hand, are
supposed to happen at one of the Army's urban warfare training centers,
in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, or Ft. Benning, Georgia.
-
- "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.
-
- Darpa expects to hand out four- to eight-year-long
early-development
contracts for ASSIST, each for $4 million or less. 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. The GI would use a
series
of GPS locators, audio recorders, and video and still cameras to keep this
diary. Those sensors could be activated "based on voluntary or
involuntary
physiological clues."
-
- 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.
-
- The proposed project is similar to digital memory efforts
going on at Microsoft and elsewhere. It would also be a big improvement
over how so-called "after action reports" are currently handled,
GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike noted. This could make ASSIST
"very
useful."
-
- "In a dismounted battle, everybody has a different
account of the action. Everyone's story is different. Everyone has a
fragmentary
insight into how the skirmish unfolded. That can make battles difficult
to reconstruct, difficult to understand and difficult to learn from. It's
hard to understand the enemy's tactics."
-
- But Darpa believes ASSIST can do more. Eventually, it
envisions using the diaries to map out cities and buildings and trade
information
in real time, not just after the fact.
-
- Some researchers, however, are concerned that ASSIST
may not go far enough. Darpa doesn't appear to be interested, for now,
in including documents in the ASSIST logs.
-
- 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.
-
- "The (armed) services, after all, are extremely
document-oriented organizations. One goes into action with a set of orders,
a situational assessment and a statement of the commander's intent; these
are conveyed primarily as textual documents. If you're going to understand
what happened as well as what was intended to happen, you'd have to
understand
these documents as well," he wrote. "Perhaps in future phases
of the program this aspect of the problem might re-emerge."
-
- To crunch all the information it receives, ASSIST will
have to be smart and able to learn from the experiences its wearers feed
it. Building these types of thinking machines has been the goal of Ronald
Brachman since he took over Darpa's Information Processing Technology
Office
in 2002.
-
- "It is the progressive improvement of the knowledge
base of the system over time that we believe will best support soldiers
on later missions," Brachman wrote in an e-mail. It will "allow
them to understand what prior patrols saw and heard, and to recognize
salient
(and potentially life-threatening) changes in the situation when they go
out on a mission."
-
- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
-
- http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64911,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
|
