Friday, June 24, 2011

Researchers Share Useful Lessons Learned in Evaluating Emerging Technologies

From NIST Tech Beat: June 21, 2011
Contact: Mark Bello
301-975-3776

Most industry executives, military planners, research managers or venture capitalists charged with assessing the potential of an R&D project probably are familiar with the wry twist on Arthur C. Clarke's third law*: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
a U.S. Marine and a native Pashto speaker
A NIST-designed framework for evaluating emerging technologies helped to focus and further efforts to develop two-way speech-translation systems to aid U.S. soldiers and Marines serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this trial, a Marine and a speaker of Pashto, a native Afghani tongue, conversed using a translation system based on smart phone technology.  The technology-development effort was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
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Credit: NIST
After serving for five years as independent evaluators of emerging military technologies nurtured by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) shares critical "lessons learned" that can help businesses and others negotiate the promises and pitfalls encountered when pushing the technology envelope to enable new capabilities.
Writing in the International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems,** the NIST researchers also describe the evaluative framework they devised for judging the performance of a system and its components as well as the utility of the technology for the intended user. Called SCORE (System, Component, and Operationally Relevant Evaluations), the framework is a unified set of criteria and software tools for evaluating emerging technologies from different perspectives and levels of detail and at various stages of development.
SCORE was developed for evaluating so-called intelligent systems—a fast growing category of technologies ranging from robots and unmanned vehicles to sensor networks, natural language processing devices and "smart" appliances. By definition, explains Craig Schlenoff, acting head of NIST's Systems Integration Group, "Intelligent systems can respond to conditions in an uncertain environment—be it a battlefield, a factory floor, or an urban highway system—in ways that help the technology accomplish its intended purpose."

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