Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Wired News: Battlefield Tech for Aid Workers

Wired News: Battlefield Tech for Aid Workers "In a bid to improve coordination in humanitarian efforts, a group of civilian and military technologists met in Hawaii this week to demonstrate several newly integrated systems, including a machine translator that can record Arabic television programs and translate the audio on the fly.
Representatives from nearly 20 military and civilian organizations gathered on a lava flow near Kona, Hawaii, to demonstrate the e-TAP translator and other communication and collaboration technologies that could be used in chaotic conditions.
The event, known as Strong Angel II, was intended to provide a platform for testing a broad collection of communications, collaboration and translation tools that can help smooth the flow of data in austere disaster zones.
...
In another demonstration, radio traffic from the local fire department was recorded to a date-stamped MP3 file and placed into a shared Groove work space. The demonstration showed that such broadcasts could be monitored from anywhere in the world and plotted on a digital map.
Rasmussen said the Groove collaboration software -- which would run on laptops and communicate with other workstations through a peer-to-peer network -- could help the military and civilian organizations trust each other better by providing transparency."

Very cool application of Groove v3.

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