Over the years, the company has continued to innovate, and is today the number one contractor for DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It also is no longer an independent company, having been bought in 2009 by Raytheon (the second time it has surrendered it independence).
These days, the company has nearly 800 employees, 60 percent of whom hold advanced degrees, and it is working on dozens of projects across a wide spectrum of disciplines.
During a Road Trip 2010 visit, CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman got a chance to see three of them: The Boomerang III, a system designed to give combat soldiers a nearly instantaneous report on where gunfire directed at them has come from--something that is critical in urban warfare where it is hard to hear and where gunshot blasts can echo off of buildings; an instant English to Pashto or Arabic translation system that allows soldiers to have a simple conversations with a non English speaker in Iraq or Afghanistan; and a Multimedia Monitoring System, that automatically records, indexes and monitors multimedia news coming across the Internet.
This is the mast of Boomerang III, the third iteration of the mobile acoustic shot detection system. It provides the azimuth, elevation and range of a shooter in less than one second.
Click here to read the related story on BBN Technologies, and click here to check out the entire Road Trip 2010 package.
