Unlocking Multimedia Treasures with Creative Software Design
Stanley Boykin
October 2011
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MITRE's Stanley Boykin is always on the lookout for the next big idea in database development. |
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For MITRE database software engineer Stanley Boykin, software design and development is a highly creative endeavor. And he wouldn't have it any other way.
"I'm always interested in finding innovative ways to use new technologies," says Boykin, who first came to MITRE as a summer intern and joined the company full time after graduating college in 1997. "Multimedia databases interest me very much, so as a developer that's where my focus is."
One of his first tasks at MITRE was to work on the Broadcast News Navigator, a multimedia information extraction system. The system analyzed video, audio, and closed-captioning text from multimedia news content to make the content searchable, he explains. "The goal of Broadcast News Navigator was to automatically segment news content into easily searchable components."
The project, which began as an internal research program, eventually transitioned to government sponsorship. Boykin supported the internal research for five years, and then had the chance to help the sponsor put the system through its paces in the field.
"That's the fun part, working directly with the sponsor and identifying exactly how the technology will be used to advance their objectives."
Identifying Critical Audio Data
Today he is one of the lead software developers supporting the company's audio hot spotting (AHS) program. AHS, originally developed at MITRE a decade ago by a group of researchers and engineers, including Boykin, uses multiple speech technologies, such as speech-to-text, language, and speaker identification software, to process audio files into text and metadata. The system then searches the text and metadata for any specific word, phrase, or speaker. Recent advances in the technology allow analysts to query and retrieve data from multimedia sources using speech recognition engines. (AHS has also expanded to include contributions from other government research laboratories and commercial companies.)
Boykin, who served as lead architect for the AHS database during its original development, is among the patent holders on the AHS technology. The program continues to generate new breakthroughs that have direct benefits for MITRE sponsors, he notes.
"The practical applications of this system are for information retrieval from multimedia," Boykin says. "The latest thing we've done is to combine the audio hot spotting tool with geospatial information that allows a user to identify place names on a map." This allows for identification of "hot spots" in places of interest from multimedia data.
"We've used this technology to help civilian agencies identify new data in audio they already have," he says. "A lot of our assignments are like that. For example, we've worked with MITRE teams supporting the Federal Aviation Administration to evaluate and select speech recognition engines and identify ways to improve their performance."
Researching New Tools for Medical Data Capture
More recently, Boykin has worked on a research project related to the development of multimodal medical data capture and representation systems. In this research, a digital pen system and voice commands enable so-called "multimodal medical data capture."
"The idea is to find different ways to input information into an electronic medical system, so you're not bound to a keyboard and a mouse," he says. "We want to give doctors the flexibility to use voice navigation tools to access and transcribe data. They can speak into the system, and the system populates the relevant information into appropriate fields."
Ambulance workers can use the digital pen to record critical patient information at accident scenes. Hospital employees then dock the pen into a computer system, allowing patient data to be uploaded to electronic health records. As part of this project, together with the project principal investigator and two other researchers, Boykin traveled to Syracuse, N.Y., where a local ambulance squad tested the system and provided feedback. Their input was invaluable to the research, he says.
While doing this work, Boykin made time for ongoing studies in his field, earning his master's degree in computer information systems at Boston University in 2009. MITRE provided tuition reimbursement for the master's degree, something he cites as a major job benefit.
"I've always liked the flexibility we have here at MITRE, particularly the ability to earn an advanced degree while working in your chosen field," he says. "The other thing I like about MITRE is its trusted adviser role. We have a level of independence here, as we look out for the government's interests. Our job is to evaluate a product based on its performance and on the value it will bring to our sponsors."
—by Maria S. Lee
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