Page 5 of this month's Michigan Business Report (a pretty badly formatted PDF) talks a little bit about i/net and what we're working on.
It's even mostly accurate.
NASA has awarded the Kalamazoo-based software firm a six-month, $70,000 contract to develop a conversational interface for the Complex Event Recognition Architecture (CERA) technology I/NET created under a previous contract. Created to manage life-support systems on space missions, CERA can recognize and analyze complex situations, either prompting operators to act or making corrections on its own. The new conversational interface, as I/NET President and CEO Stephen Markee describes it, uses voice commands to provide a "kinder, gentler" way to interact with the CERA system. "We like to say that our conversational interface allows users to talk with computers and equipment, not at them," he said. "Whereas older systems only recognize specific words and phrases, our software can monitor and analyze the context of an entire conversation, which makes it far more versatile and easier to use."
That's the sort of thing we're using lisp for.
Posted by jjwiseman at March 30, 2002 06:48 PMNow that sounds interesting. Glad to see that at least some people get to work on projects that are interesting in and of themselves. I enjoy the stuff I do, but mainly because the programming is interesting and fun and I like the people I work with. The end result/product/project is certainly not as cool as a voice controlled life support monitor for space missions.
Posted by: Alex on March 30, 2002 11:07 PMI know, I'm lucky. :)
It's not ideal, of course. Budgets get cut, projects get axed, and sometimes you work for a couple years on a project, deliver it to NASA, and never hear anything about it again.
But still, it's fun.
Posted by: jjwiseman on April 5, 2002 12:33 PM