IlliGAL Blogging

A Business Week article gives an overview of BBN's Boomerang project now fielded in Iraq to protect Allied troops by detecting and locating sniper fire. BBN chief technologist Steve Milligan's efforts to sign and initiate the project are discussed at length in the project:

Milligan thought it was possible, and on Nov. 17, 2003, BBN signed the contract with DARPA. The company's researchers knew that the physics was straightforward. Like supersonic airplanes, bullets create shock waves -- mini-sonic booms -- as they speed through the air. So if engineers arrange seven microphones like the spines of a sea urchin, a shock wave from a bullet will hit each microphone at a slightly different time, like a wave lapping against different pebbles on a beach. By measuring those time differences, it's possible to calculate the trajectory.

As it turned out, "it was much harder than we thought it would be," says Milligan. Not only is the math difficult, but the system also had to work in the cacophony of urban warfare, including echoes from shots -- and do it on the move.

This story is fine as far as it goes, but as GA afficianadoes well know, the BBN effort was supported by a crack team of card-carrying genetic algorithmists. An article written by BBNers Hussain, Montana, Brinn & Cerys entitled Genetic algorithms for UGV navigation, sniper fire localization, and unit of action fuel distribution was presented last June at GECCO 2004 at the Workshop on Military and Security Applications of Evolutionary Computation (MSAEC-2004). The paper details the development of Boomerang and other GA-based military-security applications. These efforts are the result of longstanding GA work at BBN initiated by Dave Davis (now of NuTech Solutions) and carried on by Dave Montana and other hardworking GA types. It is difficult enough working in the obscure vineyards of GAs and EC, but when a group used to toiling in obscurity does something deserving of national recognition, it would be nice if the mainstream business press would get the story right and at least mention the names of the people who really got the job done.

This year's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2005) is 25-29 June 2005 in Washington DC. This year's Military and Security Applications of Evolutionary Computation Workshop (MSAEC-2005) is held at GECCO-2005 on Saturday, June 25, 2005.