Raytheon BBN Technologies Awarded Additional Funding to Enable Early Awareness of Emerging Technology

Raytheon BBN Technologies hasbeen awarded $1.7 million in funding by the Intelligence Advanced ResearchProjects Activity (IARPA) under the Foresight and Understanding fromScientific Exposition (FUSE) program. This funding follows $5.2 millionawarded in the first phase of the program. Raytheon BBN Technologies is awholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN).According to the IARPA website, "the goal of the FUSE program is to developautomated methods that assist analysts and subject-matter experts inrecognizing emerging technologies in published scientific, technical andpatent literature." According to the solicitation, IARPA envisions a FUSEsystem that will: o Process the world's massive, growing and multilingual collection of full-text scientific, technical and patent literature. o Automatically generate, validate and prioritize areas of greatest importance. o Offer multilingual capabilities."We are exploring theories and models to scan the scientific, technical andpatent literature around the world to detect emerging technical capabilities,"said Lance Ramshaw, FUSE principal investigator for Raytheon BBN Technologies."The solution we envision will recognize trends and connections at a speed andscale far beyond what has been possible previously."Under the first phase of the program, Raytheon BBN Technologies developed asystem that uses analytical techniques and algorithms to automaticallyrecognize related topics in a variety of printed materials and identify areasthat are most likely to develop into significant technical solutions. Underthe new funding, the Raytheon BBN team will extend their techniques withfiner-grained models, applying them to forecast future levels of interest inparticular technologies based on patent applications and grants, and onscientific papers in multiple languages.