DARPA’s Communicating with Computers (CwC) developing technology to facilitate human-like communication between warfighters and their unamnned vehicles

The lifelong human imperative to communicate is so strong that people talk not only to other people but also to their pets, their plants and their computers. Straightforward as that may sound, communication involves several coordinated processes. The speaker puts ideas into words, the listener extracts ideas from words and, importantly, both rely on context to narrow down the possible meanings of ambiguous language. All of these processes are challenging for machines.

“Human communication feels so natural that we don’t notice how much mental work it requires,” said Paul Cohen, DARPA program manager. “But try to communicate while you’re doing something else –the high accident rate among people who text while driving says it all– and you’ll quickly realize how demanding it is.”

DARPA launched Communicating with Computers (CwC) program in 2015 with aim to develop technology to turn computers into good communicators. The Communicating with Computers (CwC) program aims to enable symmetric communication between people and computers in which machines are not merely receivers of instructions but collaborators, able to harness a full range of natural modes including language, gesture and facial or other expressions.

CwC  program is a basic research effort to explore how to facilitate faster, more seamless and intuitive communication between people and computers—including how computers endowed with visual or other sensory systems might learn to take better advantage of the myriad ways in which humans use contextual knowledge (gestures and facial expressions or other syntactical clues, for example) to enrich communication.

“Because humans and machines have different abilities, collaborations between them might be very productive. In the intelligence-gathering domain, for example, machines’ superior ability to collect and store information and humans’ superior ability to develop interpretive narratives from such information would find greater synergy if the people and the machines could communicate better.

If successful, CwC could advance a number of application areas, most notably robotics and semi-autonomous systems. For example, CwC could allow operators to describe missions and give direction, before and during operations, using natural language.

Conversely, when CwC-enabled robots or semi-autonomous systems encounter unexpected situations that require additional inputs from operators they would be capable of requesting assistance in natural language. Such natural language-based interactions would be far more efficient and flexible than programming or the rigidly preconfigured interfaces currently in use.

With a goal of revolutionizing everyday interactions between humans and computers, Colorado State University researchers are developing new technologies for making computers recognize not just traditional commands but also non-verbal ones, including gestures, body language and facial expressions, CSU said. The CSU project, “Communication Through Gestures, Expression and Shared Perception,” is led by Bruce Draper, computer science professor, and funded by a $2.1 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).