BBN’s specialty was voice recognition. They were also acoustics experts and designed concert halls for maximum acoustical response. A number of the video proposals I made for them were about voice recognition.
Voice rec, eh... so if you had a ****load of voice data collected over decades by satellites, that language sorting voiceprints would come in real handy.
Oh, so if there’s a hit on the voice you can associate those packets with that person and maybe use the usual IP tracking/location methods to track that person’s movements/whereabouts. Pretty slick...
Also acoustics experts? Also?
The firm was originally founded as an acoustics company. Both Dick Bolt and Leo Beranek were MIT professors whose specialty was acoustics. It was much later that they began to focus on computers and ARPANET.