Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded $1.7 million in funding by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) under the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program.

This funding follows $5.2 million awarded in the first phase of the program. Raytheon BBN Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company.

According to the IARPA website, "the goal of the FUSE program is to develop automated methods that assist analysts and subject-matter experts in recognizing emerging technologies in published scientific, technical and patent literature." According to the solicitation, IARPA envisions a FUSE system that will:

+ Process the world's massive, growing and multilingual collection of full-text scientific, technical and patent literature.

+ Automatically generate, validate and prioritize areas of greatest importance.

+ Offer multilingual capabilities.

"We are exploring theories and models to scan the scientific, technical and patent 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 and scale far beyond what has been possible previously."

Under the first phase of the program, Raytheon BBN Technologies developed a system that uses analytical techniques and algorithms to automatically recognize related topics in a variety of printed materials and identify areas that are most likely to develop into significant technical solutions.

Under the new funding, the Raytheon BBN team will extend their techniques with finer-grained models, applying them to forecast future levels of interest in particular technologies based on patent applications and grants, and on scientific papers in multiple languages.