Startup Tech Firm Grows on R&D Work The electronic ears of military and civilian intelligence agencies capture and record millions of words in dozens of languages every day, but those agencies don’t have enough human ears to listen and translate all of it. The obvious solution to the information overload: computer technology that can translate any spoken language into English and identify those portions that may contain relevant intelligence. StreamSage, a three-year-old startup small business in Washington, DC, will try to develop the technology under a $1 million contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate. Unlike “universal translators” advertised online, which work from a dictionary, StreamSage plans to use a technique called “machine translation.” It employs computing power to understand the context of the words being spoken and flag the relevant parts of conversations. The system should be able to determine, for example, whether the word “base” refers to a military installation or a ballgame. StreamSage has two years to make it work, says the company’s CEO, Seth Murray. StreamSage was founded in 2000 by three young Swarthmore College graduates. Their timing was perfect – in reverse. The high-tech boom was going bust. Murray says startup funding came from family, friends and angel investors. With venture capital investment dried up, the entrepreneurs turned to a different angel: Uncle Sam. In October 2002 StreamSage received a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Advanced Technology Program to develop its first product, a sophisticated Audio/Video Search & Retrieval System. It operates something like an Internet search engine for audio, though with greater precision, as it trolls through streaming audio and video to find keywords and display the relevant sections. Murray says it is now used by “big names” in finance to allow shareholders or analysts to search through the recording of a long conference call or stockholders’ meeting and pull out only the parts they want to hear. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center uses the system to allow scientists to search through recordings of its annual lecture series and view only the ones that interested them. The Air Force R&D project is an outgrowth of the search and retrieval technology, with the added complication of translating from foreign languages. As the technology is developed, it will be deployed by StreamSage’s partner, GMSI, a small minority-owned business in Washington.