The One CA Podcast

2: Valerie Jackson, 4th CA Group, USMC

Welcome to the One CA Podcast. Please welcome Valerie Jackson, Colonel, USMC. 

Valerie is the 4th Civil Affairs Group Commander, US Marine Corps. She discusses her journey in Civil Affairs and how the Marine Corps differs from the Army approach to Civil Affairs. She closes with some helpful tips for junior Marines.

Hosted and edited by John McElligott.

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Transcript

00:00:30    SPEAKER_01
extremely useful to a MAGTAC or any commander. They're like a utility player on a baseball field. They have multiple specialties and really will view the environment with a different perspective that can influence operations that save marine lives, shorten conflicts, help uphold the honor of the Marine Corps and American service members wherever they go.

00:01:16    SPEAKER_02
joined today by Colonel Valerie Jackson. She came through the Marine Corps as a communications officer, transferred to Marine Corps Reserve after a few years active duty, then went through the Marine Corps History Division in 2006. She then transferred over to civil affairs, joined the civil affairs branch of the Marine Corps, helped to develop the first program of instruction for the U .S. Marine Corps Civil Affairs MOS School, and she's currently the commander of the fourth civil affairs group. Ma 'am, welcome to the 1CA podcast.

00:01:48    SPEAKER_01
Thanks. Glad to be here.

00:01:49    SPEAKER_02
I wanted to start by going back into your history of the Marine Corps and then build up to some questions about what the Marine Corps is for civil affairs, what they're doing within the branch, and how that is the same or different from the Army. And then also, if we can, get into examples of what in the tactical operational strategic level the Marine Corps is currently doing in civil affairs.

00:02:13    SPEAKER_01
Okay, great.

00:02:14    SPEAKER_02
Meb, since you joined the Marine Corps back in 1994, what has been your balance of time on active duty and in the Marine Corps Reserve?

00:02:21    SPEAKER_01
It's roughly 10 years active duty, 14 years reserve, and that reserve includes three years of inactive time.

00:02:31    SPEAKER_02
Was that a mix that you had based on where you went to school at the time, a different job that you had on the civilian side?

00:02:38    SPEAKER_01
No, I had five years active duty. I got married. Pregnant with my first and did my husband's active duty as well. And so I didn't want to do the thing where you leave your kids behind. And so I got off active duty, was in the inactive reserve for three years. And then after 9 -11, got back into the operational reserve and was mobilized for about four and a half years. And then I've been a combination of what we call IMA and SMCR since then. Okay. So just sort of, you know, the periodic drilling and that sort of thing for the last seven years.

00:03:15    SPEAKER_02
On the Army side, IMA is an Individual Mobilization Augmentee. And what was the other acronym you talked about?

00:03:21    SPEAKER_01
The SMCR, Select Marine Corps Reserve, and those are our operational units. Our IMA support active duty units. The SMCR units make up the operational arms of the reserve. So, you know, our force headquarters group, our 4th Marine Division, 4th Marine Air Wing. and 4th Marine Logistics Groups all have operational deployable units, whereas an IMA detachment might be in support of a Marine Expositionary Force or a schoolhouse or things like that. They're in direct support of the active forces.

00:03:54    SPEAKER_02
You studied history. I saw that you went to Boston University and went through the Naval ROTC program. How do you think that studying history and then your first job, the Marine Corps as a communications officer, had prepared you for civil affairs?

00:04:09    SPEAKER_01
Well, it's made me that degree and my two master's degrees, which are also liberal arts degrees, really prepared me to look at the world through many different lenses to appreciate a country's culture, history, arts, strategy, human connections, all these things from peace through war. I initially, I loved history and the Marine Corps didn't care what my degree was in. That's why I picked it. But, of course, I loved the study of warfare and specifically wars that America had fought. And I think that point of reference is extraordinarily helpful when we go overseas to know the history of U .S. involvement in that area or European involvement and to connect those dots for people that may think this is the first time that we're here or someone like us is here. and to ensure people really are getting a full picture of our involvement in a certain area.

00:05:10    SPEAKER_02
Right. You talked about two master's degrees. You had a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies, Conflict Management and Resolution from UNC Wilmington, and a Master's in Strategic Studies from the Army War College as a distinguished graduate. What was the order? Was one Strategic Studies before the UNC school?

00:05:23    SPEAKER_01
a distinguished graduate.

00:05:29    SPEAKER_01
No. I mean, I say unfortunately. I was in a master's program for four straight years. I finished my UNC degree in May, graduated, and started that June at the Army War College doing the distance education program. So it was over two years. Wow. Yeah. So I didn't pick up a book for about six months after I finished the War College. I just read comic books and magazines. Wow.

00:05:57    SPEAKER_02
Ma 'am, I'd love for you to describe for the audience the force structure of civil affairs and Marine Corps. You're commander of the fourth group. How many groups are there? The number of Marines, and what is the current mix of active duty and reserve forces for the Marine Corps and civil affairs?

00:06:16    SPEAKER_01
Okay. So currently, the preponderance of our forces are and always have been, except for a brief period of time, in the reserves. We have four civil affairs groups. We have first CAG out in Southern California. Second CAG is in Anacostia, D .C. area. Third CAG is in Great Lakes. And then a fourth CAG is in Hialeah, which is just outside Miami. Each CAG, they don't mirror each other exactly, but they're pretty close. It has about 198 Marines and sailors. 179 of those are reserve Marines and sailors. And then we have about a 19 Marine active duty staff that sits at each CAG that runs everything for us during the month when we're not there, sets up all our training, runs all our admin, holds down the fort while we're not there. And really, they carry a lot of water because they have a lot of additional duties as well while they're there doing funerals. Marine Toys for Tots and that kind of stuff, really the interface with the community where our home training center is. So those are the CAGs. We are in the process of transitioning one of the CAGs to a train -advised assist unit, and that will happen during the coming year. So our overall civil affairs numbers in the reserves will shrink in the coming year. And that's sort of being played out right now, the details being hammered out, but that should happen here within 2018. And then the active component simultaneously is also in the process of reducing their structure. Each Marine Expeditionary Force, we have three, had a 50 Marine detachment as part of their structure. That detachment is going away. There are a few CMO planners that will remain at the Marine Exhibitionary Unit and the regimental level. So just a handful will remain. And so what that means for us in Reserve CAGs is we're reducing our forces, active component reducing their forces, demand signal is going up. So we're going to be busier than we ever have been. And I'm really seeing that play out in 4th CAG because... Our area of operations is Southcom, and we're picking up the responsibility of UCOM and AFRICOM, where the second civil affairs group, that's the group that's transitioning, that's where they're focused right now. So we're starting to pick up some of their operations and exercises and things like that. So we're not forward, and that's a good thing.

00:09:00    SPEAKER_02
Right. Do you think the waxing and waning of the force,

00:09:04    SPEAKER_02
is it? Is it a function of how the demand signal may have been reduced in the past, and then it takes two or three years to get everything signed off and implemented, and now if the demand is higher again, it'll take another few years to ramp back up if you need to?

00:09:21    SPEAKER_01
I think that's part of it. Historically, we only had, for the longest time, up until a few years ago, we just had first and second CAGs. And then no active duty forces. And we went through with OIF and OEF really realized the need for this very critical MOS doing COIN and stability ops. And so ramped up the reserve force and added active structure, made it a primary MOS for enlisted Marines. It's a secondary MOS for officers. And so we, as officers, will need to float back and forth between that and our primary MOS. We can talk about that later if it's better, a different point. But, yeah, I think we've done this historically where we think, okay, well, we just fought that war. Now we're on to something bigger and better. So we're going to reduce those forces that we don't think we need anymore. But the fact of the matter is, I mean, there's a need for civil affairs, Marines, and soldiers all the time in all phases of conflict. And it's just, you know, where is someone going to assume risk? You know, would they rather have more, you know, cyber operators than civil affairs Marines or, you know, train, advise, assist folks in civil affairs? And it's just, you know, it's just a product of, OK,

00:10:45    SPEAKER_00
know,

00:10:47    SPEAKER_01
I'm going to reduce these forces. You know, Congress tells us we can only have X amount of Marines. And so what do I want my force to look like?

00:10:54    SPEAKER_00
Right. And so we're, you know,

00:10:55    SPEAKER_01
And so we're, you know, we're taking some cuts right now. And that's okay because we still have the Marines that we can, you know, reform in a heartbeat pretty much that have been trained and have a lot of operational experience. And so if we need them again, you know, they're there.

00:11:10    SPEAKER_02
Right. Ma 'am, you mentioned the Civil Affairs MOS is secondary for officers for enlisted. Is it secondary or primary?

00:11:16    SPEAKER_01
Is it secondary or primary? It is primary now. I mean, there still are quite a few enlisted Marines that have multiple MOSs. That maybe came to the MOS late, but Houston Marines can get civil affairs as a primary MOS.

00:11:30    SPEAKER_01
Marines can get civil affairs as a primary MOS.

00:11:35    SPEAKER_02
Does that mean that you have promoted within the Marine Corps as a communications officer and not civil affairs?

00:11:42    SPEAKER_01
Right. Actually, in the Marine Corps, the path to success for promotions, past major, is command and street cred in your primary MOS. And so a CAG or time in a CAG is nice to have, but there's no opportunity for 05 level command. And so if you want to command in the reserves, you have to do it in your primary MOS at the lieutenant colonel level. And then there's only four for the time being, getting ready to be three CAGs that are 06 level commands. You know, all of us or most of us have had 05 level command leading up to this in our primary MLSs. So it's not always career enhancing. And I have to tell my officers, hey, you have to give back. As much as you love civil affairs, you have to give back to your primary MOS if you want to continue to advance in the reserves. So some of them don't, and they're very happy where they are. But for the ones that do, you know, that want to be CAD commanders someday, you know, sadly I have to let them go.

00:12:54    SPEAKER_02
Ma 'am, I had read that the Marine Corps and the Army share the same five core tasks for civil affairs. So when it comes to the Marine Corps' approach to CA, how do you see the two services as being the same, and how do you think that they're different?

00:13:08    SPEAKER_01
Okay, so for the Marine Corps, we always deploy and support a MAGTAP. So Marines are always, whatever type civil affairs section you have, whether it's a two -person team or a full team or a detachment or an entire CAG, we will always be in direct support of a ground commander. Sometimes a ground commander might be a logistics element, but more often than not, it's an infantry commander or a JTF or something like that, but a MAGTAF. The Army operates independently, so you can have your teams and your... platoons and companies out there conducting civil affairs operations independent, if you will, of a ground commander. And the Marine Corps does not operate that way. We have our same core task, but the difference is, and I don't believe the Army does this, is that we say facilitate in front of each task. As, you know, CA Marines aren't necessarily always the duty expert in that core task. For example, When we're in support of Department of State in an HADR scenario, we're not always executing for humanitarian assistance, but we're facilitating the execution of it. We're not always executing populist and resources control, but we're facilitating it for the infantry that we're supporting. Does that make sense?

00:14:33    SPEAKER_02
It does. So facilitating through other assets in the area, other NGOs or the host government or whoever they are.

00:14:39    SPEAKER_01
Yeah, sometimes it is us, but because it's not a primary MOS for us, we're CA generalists. And I know the Army has CA generalists as well, but you have more specialists than we do. And the only specialists that we have in the Marine Corps are our lawyers and our Navy doctors. So we'll say that they are... Definitely executing when they're, you know, advising on rule of law matters or carrying out, you know, public health missions or that kind of thing. But since it's secondary MOS and we're generalists, we're not always the one executing. Many times we are or we're planning for it, but it's not it's not always us. So it's just, you know, to some it might seem like semantics. But, you know, more often than not, if, you know, you have an infantry. platoon that's executing a checkpoint to control population flow, you know, over a border. Those aren't civil affairs Marines that are controlling that checkpoint. They might be advising.

00:15:15    SPEAKER_00
Many times

00:15:40    SPEAKER_01
There's probably only two of them there to start with. You know, they might be advising on how it's conducted and maybe interfacing with the locals in the area, that kind of thing. But it's not, you know, it's not a civil affairs platoon. It's an infantry platoon. See what I'm saying? I do,

00:15:53    SPEAKER_02
do, ma 'am. Yeah, so you don't have a lot of people to go around and you have to. Use them sparingly and be more of a force multiplier. Right.

00:15:55    SPEAKER_01
of people

00:16:01    SPEAKER_02
Ma 'am, your bio described how you assisted in the development of the program of instruction, the POI, for the first Marine Corps CA MOS school. When did that school launch, and how has it evolved since then?

00:16:14    SPEAKER_01
We officially launched in 2009. We really saw the need to have a Marine Corps -centric civil affairs focus, and that's not a deal. big on the Army or the Navy because we had some Marines that were teaching at the Navy school when it existed. But what we found was that when we sent Civil Affairs Marines downrange in the early days of OIF, they weren't as in tune with the concept of the MAGTAP and their role inside of the operations and what their role was with the commander.

00:16:39    SPEAKER_01
in tune with the concept of the MAGTAP and their role inside of the operations and what their role was with the commander. They were more independent thinking, as if they were inside the Army model than inside the Marine Corps model. And so what we really needed to do was sort of rein that back in and teach it with a Marine Corps flavor. And so we launched the school, and at its height, we were doing probably six, seven courses a year. We trained active duty. We trained reservists. We trained soldiers. We've had some foreign military come through. And back in the early days, it was staffed primarily by a mobilized reservist. And then we had a few contractors and then a couple of active duty Marines. But now it's flipped. A lot of those mobilized reservists became contractors as the money dried up. And then we have slightly more active duty or active component Marines and then some contractors as well. But the program of instruction has also become a lot more sophisticated. And it's always under constant review to make sure we're... are teaching the latest and greatest and making sure that we're supporting that MAGTAF commander in the most effective way possible. And they've also added some courses to include a CMO planners course and a G9 course.

00:18:01    SPEAKER_00
they've also

00:18:04    SPEAKER_01
a G9 course. So with our latest edition of the MOS manual, we've added the MOS of CMO planner. And so all gunnery sergeants and above need to attend that course to hold a line number. in that rank and inside a CAG or some of the few active duty line numbers as well.

00:18:20    SPEAKER_00
that rank

00:18:27    SPEAKER_01
So we're definitely professionalizing the force. We've made it a lot more Marine Corps -centric and a lot more applicable to some of the operations we might find ourselves in.

00:18:27    SPEAKER_00
So we're

00:18:38    SPEAKER_02
Is that school at Quantico? Yes. Is there cross -communication? Do you talk with the Army, the Special Warfare Center, and school at Fort Bragg and share lessons learned?

00:18:49    SPEAKER_01
You know, I left there in 2011. I still do some contract work with them periodically, so I don't really have a good picture as to the interaction. We did some with the Army when I was there in relation to the female engagement team training. As a matter of fact, I got a certificate of commendation from the Army for that. I did, I think, a teleconference with them a couple times just talking about how we were doing it. We were training because we had all our female engagement teams come through the civil affairs schoolhouse because much of what they were doing was CMO -based. And so it made sense for them to do that. And we were in the process of developing, at that time, a program of instruction for female engagement. And now that seems to have come back around and we're actually going to have a female engagement officer and enlisted secondary specialty.

00:19:46    SPEAKER_01
So that's in the works for down the road a couple of years from now, I think.

00:19:51    SPEAKER_02
That's wonderful.

00:19:51    SPEAKER_01
wonderful. Yeah.

00:19:53    SPEAKER_02
Colonel Jackson, I wanted to ask you about building off of the schoolhouse updates. What's currently happening? So when you have within your CAG, for example, described at the tactical and operational levels, How does normal training work on a monthly or yearly basis? Do you have combat training center rotations going through 29 Palms? What happens at the home station? What type of training do you have?

00:20:20    SPEAKER_01
Okay, so joining an HCAG is slightly different in the way they do things, but, of course, in order to hold the line number, you can show up without the MOS, but our understanding for our Marines is you get there as soon as possible. and get to the schoolhouse and get MOS qualified. And so at that point, we try to launch our Marines downrange as quickly as possible to get them on an exercise or to get them to additional training somewhere, get them involved with something that may be going on, a conference or a planning conference, something like that, to really get immersion training after going through the schoolhouse. The Peace Out of 29 Palms, I'm going to say first civil affairs group and third is really starting to support some of those evolutions out there with the infantry. But a lot of our struggle has been, hey, you know, telling these ground units, if you're training and you think civilians are going to be there, which, you know, they mostly are, you need to have civil affairs forces there. And there's been a little bit of back and forth with trying to get us involved in that. But it looks like that is happening this year. So those CAGs are primarily focused on that. We have our hands full with what we're doing in support of Marfor South and Southcom, and now picking up some of the requirements with 2MF at Camp Lejeune over in Europe and in Africa. So primarily, our guys in 4CAP historically have done a lot of tactical -level operations. We are now definitely broaching into the operational level. You know, sending planners abroad. We have planners that are mobilized with OIR, planners that will be in heavy support of 2MAT. But our guys have quite a bit of tactical experience from all the things they do down at South Com anymore.

00:22:16    SPEAKER_02
Right. So the demand signal that you're seeing, you say, shifting toward Europe and Africa, mirrors, I think, what's happening within the Army and civil affairs and the military at large as potential. conflicts are on the horizon or adversaries for which we want to be prepared. The Army has regional accords in Africa, a lot of exercises in Europe, so it sounds like you're getting deeper, more deeply involved with those.

00:22:43    SPEAKER_01
We are, and that's just because of where we're geographically located. Now, the two Midwest and the West Coast CAGs are definitely focused on the Korean Peninsula. And what's going on in the Pacific, that's not to say that we couldn't all drop what we're doing and head over there if need be. In fact, we are working some of those scenarios into our training as we speak. But we have a general area that we focus on so that we can be most ready for the commander that we're most likely to support on a sort of day -to -day basis.

00:23:19    SPEAKER_02
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Hello again, friends. John Gallagher here. I want to tell you about another reason for supporting the show. OneCA is under the umbrella of the Civil Affairs Association, a 501c19 veterans organization. People can support the podcast through tax -deductible donations. Money raised will be used to send junior NCOs and officers to two events hosted by the CA Association. The first is a symposium held each fall. The second is a roundtable and workshop held in the spring. Each junior NCO and officer selected will also receive a membership to the CA Association. If you'd like to support the podcast, then please visit the CA Association website at civilaffairsasoc .org. That's civilaffairsasoc .org. And please remember that all donations are tax deductible. Thanks for your support.

00:24:28    SPEAKER_02
Hi, and welcome back to the 1CA Podcast. Are there any current joint training operations between Marine Corps and Army Civil Affairs Forces, or anything being planned that you can talk about?

00:24:39    SPEAKER_01
Well, right now, we're doing New Horizons down in Panama, and that's definitely joint. And we also have an enduring mission down in Belize, which is one of the exceptions to... Marines being in support of a MAGTAF because really we're in support of the SCO in the embassy in Belize. And has our three Marine team out in the hinterland of Belize executing civil military operations. They are working side by side with Army out there in the countryside. So that's an enduring mission for us right now. Again, it's not doctrinal for the Marine Corps. I like it because it gives our guys a lot of experience, but that is probably something that will transition, what that looks like will likely transition in the next year or so with our special MAGTAP that we have afloat there based out of Honduras. But New Horizons is a massive Southcom exercise, theater security cooperation, and that's definitely joint. And, again, our Marines are getting a lot of experience in that realm and are quite actually independent. So I'm really proud because, again, it's a new MOS. These are usually mostly young captains that have just joined the reserves with a brand -new MOS, and we get them school -trained and we kick them out the door, and they do great things.

00:26:12    SPEAKER_02
Yeah, try by fire. Yep. That's wonderful. Do you try to? A lot of those countries speak Spanish. Do the Marines get language training, or are they encouraged to get language training?

00:26:26    SPEAKER_01
We have, just because of where we're located, we have a tremendous amount of Spanish speakers already on staff. So what we'll do if, you know, Belize is not an issue, but most of the other places yet, it is Spanish. So we'll try to get one of our Spanish -speaking Marines either on the deployment or even sometimes we've sent, you know, a motor team Marine or an admin Marine who's not civil affairs and his or her sole responsibility is to be an interpreter. So it gets them downrange doing fun stuff, you know, outside of the home training center. But, yeah, a lot of them already have it or what they're involved in is, you know, there are interpreters on staff, that kind of thing. But to my knowledge, it's not been an issue if our folks aren't speaking Spanish. But we usually do have, especially the NCOs and staff NCOs, quite a few of them are Spanish speakers.

00:27:07    SPEAKER_00
know, there are

00:27:15    SPEAKER_00
usually do have,

00:27:21    SPEAKER_02
I'm sure it helps. But even if you speak the language fluently, it's nice to have an interpreter so you have a lag time if you're engaging with people so you can. Think about it a little bit more, but then also try to cut through with the translation if you really know what they're talking about.

00:27:36    SPEAKER_01
Right.

00:27:37    SPEAKER_02
Ma 'am, could you describe some of the recent deployments for Marine Corps Civil Affairs units or teams that are sent abroad? What were their missions and how did it go?

00:27:46    SPEAKER_01
I don't have complete visibility in what all Marine Corps civil affairs teams are doing throughout the globe, but I can tell you what four civil affairs group Marines are doing. I think I mentioned that we have a three Marine team right now in Belize in direct support of the security cooperation officer there, working closely with Army CA. Again, not doctrinal for us, but it's a great experience for them. We have a team in support of New Horizons, which is about to start in Panama. It's going to go through the month of June, which is South Com's major theater security cooperation exercise. And then during the course of the next several months, I'm going to rotate about 46 Marines and sailors through that exercise to give them their annual training. So it's quite an experience. I have a durational officer there, a bright young captain, again, newly school trained, and she is going to be the one responsible for direct liaison with the exercise planners. But I'll have Marines, officers, and staff and COs rotate through on a two -week basis between now and June. And basically they're conducting civil military operations throughout the area. and security cooperation training as well. I also have a team that's on the special MAGTAC that's based out of Honduras. They do extensive security cooperation training and civil military operations throughout Central and South America, and they're also our first responders in the event of a HADR scenario. All these exercises and New Horizons went in the Dominican Republic last year, and now it's this year in Panama, but these similar exercises went last year. Marines did great. The Army and the Air Force love them. They came home with multiple awards and accolades and, you know, really accorded themselves very well, not only as Marines, but as U .S. service members downrange, and I was just really proud of them. Congratulations.

00:29:46    SPEAKER_01
Thank you. We've not had any issues. And I feel like the training that they've gotten there, you know, I could send them anywhere, and they would do great things.

00:29:55    SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it says a lot for how they were prepared and the trust in which you and other commanders are placing them. That's wonderful.

00:30:02    SPEAKER_01
The other services really are very quick with their praise, which I personally appreciate. You know, our Marines are essentially fire and forget weapons. And if they have a question, they'll come back and ask. But other than that, you know, they're off doing their thing.

00:30:19    SPEAKER_02
Colonel Jackson, I wanted to ask you, if you came across a young Marine, what would be your elevator pitch for the young Marine to consider joining the Civil Affairs branch?

00:30:29    SPEAKER_01
I would ask them, you know, do they want to broaden their skill sets and give themselves more flexibility in the reserves with an additional MOS? I'll tell them that Civil Affairs Marines are extremely useful to a MAGTAF or any commander. They're like a utility player on a baseball field. They have multiple specialties. and really view the environment with a different perspective that can influence operations that save marine lives, shorten conflicts, help uphold the honor of the Marine Corps and American service members wherever they go. And I'll say, hey, do you want to be a part of that? And most of the time they say, yes, I do.

00:31:06    SPEAKER_02
Yeah, it tells itself. It seems to me, since I've been in the branch for the Army Reserve, it's fascinating to see current events. and how they may apply to civil affairs. And it's almost everything. When you look at a country study or an area study for a place, how the economy and the history and your background, how all that ties together with the industry and the politics. It's a great way to analyze what's happening in the world.

00:31:32    SPEAKER_01
It really is. And I think, you know, what I love, again, about the Marines in my CAG, and I'm sure the other CAGs are similar, is that they bring so much to the fight. They bring their civil affairs expertise. They bring their primary MOS expertise. They bring their civilian skill set. And these Marines, we really train to think, to analyze the civil dimension, to look at it the way no one else is looking at it, and then to make impactful statements and contributions to an operations plan. I just couldn't be any prouder to be a commander of a unit like that.

00:32:16    SPEAKER_02
Ma 'am, I want to conclude with a final question for you about tips for young or sort of mid -career Marines. So if some of your Marines from your group, from 4th CAG, are listening to this, what would you have to share with them about tips for 2018 and how to prepare for 2019?

00:32:39    SPEAKER_01
I'd say they have to be ready for anything. You know, I've done a lot of talking the last 12 months about, you know, how a lot of what we do in Central and South America is phase zero, phase one type stuff. But they've got to be ready for, you know, phase three operations. And, you know, next drill, we're actually going to practice some of that stuff.

00:32:58    SPEAKER_00
know, next

00:33:01    SPEAKER_01
I have a handful of former grunts, infantry in my unit, and they're really excited about that. But, I mean, the fact is they have to be ready for anything. They have to pay attention to what's going on in the world. They have to broaden their scope outside of South Com and say, hey, am I ready to go? You know, our commander, Lieutenant General McMillan, likes to say you have to be ready to fight tonight. So are you ready to fight tonight? You know, do you have, you know, all your boxes checked? Is your training done?

00:33:28    SPEAKER_00
you have,

00:33:34    SPEAKER_01
Are your affairs in order? Are you ready to go? And if you're not ready to go, then this is not the place for you. So it's, you know, it's very much a do or die type scenario for these young Marines. But, you know, Marines don't join the Corps to sit at a home training center in Hialeah, Florida, you know, to show up once a month and do computer -based training. That's not why they join. And so if they want to go somewhere, they want to do something meaningful that they can brag about to their friends back home and their families for the rest of their lives. Hey, be a part of a unit that actually does something to help either the Marines or a joint task force or civilians. You name it, we can do it all. Hey, just be ready.

00:34:19    SPEAKER_02
Yes, ma 'am. You sold me. Well, it sounds great, but I think I'll stay in the Army for right now.

00:34:22    SPEAKER_01
great,

00:34:25    SPEAKER_01
All right. Let me know if you change your mind.

00:34:27    SPEAKER_02
Yes, ma 'am. Colonel Valerie Jackson, Commanding Officer of the 4th Civil Affairs Group for the U .S. Marine Corps. Thank you very much for your time.

00:34:35    SPEAKER_01
it's been my pleasure thank you thank you for spending some time with us

00:35:00    SPEAKER_02
spending some time with us Please subscribe and come back for another installment of 1CA. Until then, be safe and secure the victory.

1: Jon May: Artificial Intelligence for HA/DR Operations - LORELEI

Please welcome Jon May, Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

Dr. May describes his work on a DARPA-funded artificial intelligence project called Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) and its connections with HA/DR operations for Civil Affairs.

One CA is sponsored by the Civil Affairs Association.

Hosted and edited by John McElligott.

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Transcript

00:01:00    Introduction
and welcome to the 1CA podcast. My name is John McElligot. We're joined today by Jonathan May. He received his PhD in computer science from USC in 2010. Prior to rejoining USC and the Information Sciences Institute in 2014, he was a research scientist at SDL Language Weaver. John's researching areas include language, a natural language processing, specifically machine translation and semantic parsing. and formal language theory. Dr. May, thank you very much for your time. Thanks very much for having me. It's great to be here. Sir, before we dive into the program that you're working on and how it relates to humanitarian assistance and disaster response and civil affairs branch of the military, we want to go through some of the basics of what your field entails. So if you could go into more detail about your background and the natural language processing field. Sure, great. I was a computer science major in college, and I started to become very interested in artificial intelligence.

00:02:09    SPEAKER_04
intelligence. I thought it was really cool that, you know, we could build systems that could, you know, try to be, you know, mimic the brain sort of, or play games against humans. And in particular,

00:02:23    SPEAKER_04
I like the idea of, I discovered this field called natural language processing. which is really about how humans and computers can talk to each other, really how computers can understand human language and then produce human language and everything that that entails.

00:02:44    SPEAKER_04
And today you see a lot of natural language processing, or it's also sometimes known as computational linguistics, in your day -to -day life. So if you're just using, say, Google and typing a search query there, you're just... You're using your own words to try to figure out what you want,

00:03:00    SPEAKER_04
want, and then a computer algorithm somewhere is trying to find a web page that's responsive to you. So that's natural language processing right there. Other areas are determining when you spelled a word wrong. A kind of classic example is Siri, who's listening to you speaking,

00:03:19    SPEAKER_04
to you speaking, understanding the speech patterns and turning those into words and understanding what those words are supposed to mean and then trying to give you an answer. automatic translation, which is, you know, where you've got some Chinese webpage and you want to figure out, you know, what does this mean?

00:03:36    SPEAKER_04
You know, maybe it's a train ticket booking page. You need to figure out how to buy your tickets and they don't have the data. Somebody didn't write a translation, so you have to automatically translate these words. And then you can actually engage in commerce there, even though they don't speak your language and you don't speak theirs. So I love all that stuff. It really is. It seems to me like a great way to, particularly translation, to unify the world. So we're all kind of speaking one language together. And yeah, there's lots of great accomplishments that have happened over the past 20 years or so. And I think there's a lot more still to be done. It seems to be a field that's advancing at a rapid pace right now. Yes, yes. In particular, the field has really been around about as long as computers have been around. Pretty much, you know, the early development of computers that were at the end of the Second World War were first used for calculating missile trajectories,

00:04:31    SPEAKER_04
of the Second World War were first used for calculating missile trajectories, but then the second use was trying to do automatic translation. In particular, like in the early 50s, the U .S. was particularly keen, of course, on translating Russian. And this was way back when, but it wasn't very good for a very long time. But in the modern era, we have... volumes of data available to us and really sophisticated fast hardware that's able to process this data and so we're able to take advantage of all this data and learn statistics about the data to help us that have led to lots of gains really practical gains and in the past say five to seven years in particular

00:05:21    SPEAKER_04
You've probably heard about these advent of deep learning, which is the use of this particular kind of technology called neural networks. And they have really led to some really stunning developments. Now, sometimes it can be hard to tell whether you're talking to a computer or a human. Wow. And so it's fascinating. And I wanted to ask you about a question that... was included in a brief that you had provided to some civil affairs troops recently. The question was, can we leverage artificial intelligence or AI to respond to disasters around the world? What inspired you to ask that question? I want to give credit to DARPA for really asking that question before I did. But I saw,

00:06:07    SPEAKER_04
well, I think they saw, and we all saw it together. I was working for... this machine translation company after graduation in 2010.

00:06:16    SPEAKER_04
And I remember, so this was a company and we were providing translation, many different kinds of languages to companies and also for some government projects and also to help human translators actually do their job better. And I remember there was the earthquake, I believe, in Haiti. And it was a big humanitarian crisis. Most of the people in Haiti, of course, speak Haitian Creole, which isn't a language that we've historically spent efforts on trying to build automatic translation systems for. There's not a lot of data. There's not too many people that actually speak Haitian Creole, the population of Haiti,

00:06:56    SPEAKER_04
which is relatively small. But I asked my boss at the time, I said, you know, is there anything that we could do? I feel like maybe we could be of some service. And he said, well, I don't think there's much we could do. I mean, you know, these people are in a crisis situation right now. And it takes us quite a bit of time to gather enough data to build a system. And even building the systems takes some time. And by the time we're ready to deploy a translation system to maybe connect, say, USAID providers with the people on the ground who are maybe texting out their requests. It's going to be too late. So we didn't do anything, but there were people who did. And there was a program where they went down,

00:07:37    SPEAKER_04
they went down, and there was a team of people who did what I do. But they also brought in native Haitians, expats, and they were trying their best to use what technology they could and also just kind of scramble to translate these things as fast as possible. But it was kind of like it would have been better if they prepared this sort of thing ahead of time.

00:08:00    SPEAKER_04
Well, prior to that, we had done, I worked on a team, I think, back in, I want to say, 2003. And we were looking into, you know, if we needed to develop a system in a new language for translation or for, sometimes translation is fine, but you actually typically get lots and lots of data thrown at you all at once. I think analysts can receive, you know, tens of thousands of documents that they have to sift through a day. And just translating them all is not really necessarily going to be that great. There's other techniques that are part of natural language processing, which is understanding the most important parts of a document, trying to provide a summary, or just identify the names of the people, the places, and maybe the events that are happening in a big picture to allow some triage to happen. So we wanted to know, could we build those systems? If we just learned about a language, and somebody said, okay, go, build a system, what could you do in 30 days? And back in 2003, we tried doing this.

00:08:58    SPEAKER_04
doing this. And I was really kind of taken by how surprisingly well we were able to do with the language at the time, the Cebuano,

00:09:06    SPEAKER_04
which is... Where is that spoken? I think it's in the Pacific, in the Pacific Islands region,

00:09:15    SPEAKER_04
and I should look that up. Give me a second,

00:09:19    SPEAKER_04
if that's all right. Maybe Papua New Guinea or someplace like that? So, I'm sorry. The Philippines. is spoken in... Yes, it's an Austronesian language, so it's native to the Philippines. It's the second most spoken language in the Philippines after Tagalog.

00:09:40    SPEAKER_04
It should have been fresh around now. But anyway, yes, so it's spoken in the Philippines. But I hadn't studied it before, and most of our team hadn't. And, you know, we did a pretty good job. It was kind of surprising how well we were able to do without too much specific Cebuano data, and we didn't talk to any Cebuano experts. And so this kind of, I think this idea was sort of stirring around, and then after 2010, at DARPA they came out with this program, which was about,

00:10:12    SPEAKER_04
the name of the program was called Lorelei, and it was about trying to be responsive to the humanitarian aid and disaster relief needs when you don't have a lot of resources available. in terms of data and in terms of time. So given very limited data in the language that you need to build a system for and given a very limited amount of time,

00:10:34    SPEAKER_04
very limited amount of time, really ideally 24 hours is what they're aiming for. What kind of systems can we build? What kind of technology can we build? And so that's been a major focus for me and for a number of researchers actually around the world over the past few years. And it's been great because we really... We get to work with people who speak the language but aren't experts in linguistics or experts in computer science,

00:10:57    SPEAKER_04
speak the language but aren't experts in linguistics or experts in computer science, and they teach us about their language in this really limited time frame. And we're able to build surprisingly sophisticated systems. It was surprising to me at first, actually. And, you know, if you have a little more time, you do a little better, but when you don't have a lot of time, you can still do pretty well. I think there's also been some nice interest in deployment. in various agencies. So it's been a pretty nice story.

00:11:28    SPEAKER_04
story. Right. Yeah, I think 24 hours is very fast for anyone, but especially for civil affairs and for the military, unless we happen to be on the ground or in country already, if there was a natural disaster or outbreak or some kind of man -made event, it would take a little bit longer for most teams to respond. But if USAID or some other assets were already, you know, on their way as a Dart team, for example, then we would be coordinating with them and having a system like this in place would be very helpful. Well, it's really great to hear that 24 hours is a little too fast because, to be honest, if you wait a week, it's a lot better. So, you know, we can do some early triage, but then actually the more we... The more we see how we're doing at the beginning, the better our systems can get. So in our early days, we did give ourselves up to a month. And by the time you're done with a month of training, you've actually got a fairly usable system. It's still not at the same level as, say, like a French -English translation system where we've got 100 billions of words of French and English, and we've been studying that problem for years and years.

00:12:47    SPEAKER_04
We do pretty well, and we learn more insights on the language over the time, too. So our first year, we were working with Uyghur, which I'm actually kind of pronouncing wrong. I think it's more like Uyghur. But this is a language that's spoken in China, in the Xinjiang region, which is in the northwest. So it's spoken by an ethnic minority. It's a Turkic language, actually. It has no relationship to... to Mandarin. And it's, you know, so we were working with Royale and we realized after a few days,

00:13:22    SPEAKER_04
maybe a week of working with it, that hey, you know, this language is actually quite similar to some language that we've already got data for. And we had a lot of Uzbek data. And so we were able to develop techniques for pretending that the Uzbek was Uyghur and actually transforming the Uzbek into Uyghur. And now... increases the amount of data that you've got available. And this is kind of a major part of this program, is trying to look around and see, you know, even though you don't have a lot of resources in the language that you care about, if you have a lot of resources in other related languages, you can figure out what those related languages are. Can you leverage those? Right. And furthermore, you know, there's, to some degree, all languages have things in common, right? So even though...

00:14:09    SPEAKER_04
Chinese and English might seem very, very far apart from each other, and in many ways they are. There's still kind of common understandings that underlie all languages, and you can take advantage of these things too. So there's kind of like language universal ideas.

00:14:25    SPEAKER_04
So if you have a bunch of news data, say, and it's in some language, you don't know this language at all. Maybe you're not even told what the language is. You can still assume that people are probably going to be talking, at some point about dates, right? You know, days of the week or months or years. Right. And, you know, we do tend to have, to segment our...

00:14:51    SPEAKER_04
calendar into, you know, roughly four -week chunks. And so there's, you know, about between 28 and 31 days in every month. And so you can kind of pick up on these common regularities when you see those numbers between 1 and 28 being used near the same words over and over again. You can maybe guess that those words that are used near are names of months. And you kind of like, it's kind of like a cryptic puzzle in a way.

00:15:13    SPEAKER_04
Right. Like the way a linguist would break it down. Exactly, exactly.

00:15:17    SPEAKER_04
So, you know, you're, it's, or really like a... like a Rosetta Stone kind of approach, right? You're triangulating words together and really kind of like unlocking the logic puzzle.

00:15:27    SPEAKER_00
Right, the syntax of it. Yeah, yeah. And the trick there is can you write algorithms to do this?

00:15:33    SPEAKER_04
And, you know, can you get away with doing it when you have imperfect data, noisy data, not a lot of data, data that's not even related to your task? This is a big part of the HADR issue, right? So we want to respond to earthquakes, civil unrest. droughts, floods,

00:15:51    SPEAKER_04
explosions, terrorism. But the data that we have often is not really that.

00:15:55    SPEAKER_04
data that we have often is not really that. You know, sometimes we'll, the most frequent data you're going to have is the Bible and the Quran. Now, there are floods and earthquakes and violence and uprisings and wars in those documents, but they're written in a very different way from the way people are talking about these things nowadays. So, you know, you often actually will get some... Your initial translation engines, you'll see some very flowery language, and this is usually because you're picking up words and phrases that you've learned from translations of the Bible or the chron.

00:16:24    SPEAKER_04
picking up words and phrases that you've learned from translations of the Bible or the chron. And so it's a big challenge to try to figure out what is the kind of language that somebody who's in a disaster situation is using and train your systems to be specifically aware about that domain.

00:16:47    SPEAKER_04
Yeah. One thing that might be helpful is to include as early on as possible a linguist who understands the language, but also someone from the area who understands the colloquialisms and can tell you, well, this is the way we use this word that in another part of the country they don't use that at all. Absolutely. And this is a major part of this program, actually. I think it's one of the things that makes this program unique. relative to other language technology programs, is this express notion and kind of like a controlled study of getting access to a native speaker who can help you,

00:17:27    SPEAKER_04
help you, right? We call these the native informants. We like to think of them as like a taxi driver. So it's somebody who is local to the U .S. now, but is not from here. Their first language is the language in question. And they speak English. as a second language, and they don't have necessarily linguistic expertise, but they do know about their country, of course. And so a big research challenge for us is to know how can we use human resources as effectively and efficiently as possible. And actually,

00:18:02    SPEAKER_04
it occurs to me that civil affairs probably... has a lot of strategies for how to engage with local populations and how to acquire information in the right way and ask questions in the style that's appropriate. This is a big problem for us, actually.

00:18:24    SPEAKER_04
We're computer scientists nerds, right? And I think, like everybody, we're in our own world a lot of the time. We're talking with our own people. And we have our own acronyms for something. And, you know, I might say like one, maybe a term of ours, you know, like, oh, you know, can you tokenize this data and figure out what the foreign and the English words, the alignment of the foreign English words. That's a, you know, I don't expect most people to understand what I'm talking about there. These are some very, very specific kinds of things.

00:18:57    SPEAKER_04
Just to say tokenize. tokenized right yeah what does that mean right it has a very specific meaning in the way that i would think about it and uh and without thinking about it i would just use that word and assume everybody knows it and i imagine that similar kind of situation happens with civil affairs um where you know you have your own terminology but if you want to get information

00:19:04    SPEAKER_04
and without thinking about it i would just use that word and assume everybody knows it and i imagine that similar kind of situation happens with civil affairs um where you know you have your own terminology

00:19:18    SPEAKER_04
from somebody who's, you know, outside that bubble, right? You have to think about how to engage that. And in fact, it might be nice to have a conversation about how the lessons that you learned and that, you know, institutionally in civil affairs has learned because we're sort of... We are designing systems. We're designing methodologies for interfacing with our native informant. But it is challenging. We found that, you know, asking, you know, even just asking the question like, is this sentence a good translation of this other? Is this a good English translation of this foreign sentence? It's very hard to get an answer that is both timely and helpful because, you know, we want to know, you know, is... Is it just a completely random two sentences that could be not alike?

00:20:07    SPEAKER_04
be not alike? They're like night and day to each other. Or is it like maybe there's some shades of translation difference that aren't quite captured that we don't really care about? And by asking the question wrong, we can spend 20 or 30 minutes going down a rabbit hole and not really get the data that we need. And so we need a challenge that we're... addressing and I think getting better at is just asking the right questions that are going to help us.

00:20:29    SPEAKER_04
that we're...

00:20:33    SPEAKER_04
the right questions that are going to help us. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor. Let me tell you about the Civil Affairs Association, the main sponsor of the 1CA podcast. It was established in 1947. The Civil Affairs Association is a veterans organization serving professionals of the U .S. civil affairs community. Members have served or are currently serving in the armed forces or are the descendants of those who served. As a tax -exempt organization, the association operates within the guidelines of Internal Revenue Code Section 501c19. It is organized for educational, professional, fraternal, and social purposes. The association promotes esprit de corps and disseminates relevant information. The CA Association also serves as an advocate for civil affairs within DOD to ensure an adequate capability to perform any mission assigned or task to the CA community. Membership costs are low. E1 through E4 pay only $5 a year. E5 through E9 pay $20. Cadets and midshipmen pay $10, and officers and civilians pay $25 a year. Life membership is also low, pegged now at $200. So if you're committed to the CA community, then it makes a lot of sense to invest in a life membership and save in the long term.

00:22:05    SPEAKER_04
Hi, welcome back to the 1CA podcast. Dr. May, how do your data sources vary in the test cases you've run so far from an urban area that may have better newspaper distribution or readability to more social media access and use to a more rural area? How does that differ even in the U .S. if you're going to test it here, but in other countries in foreign languages? How would that apply? Yeah, that's a great question. So we are tasked with analyzing news data. So for one thing, we have both text data, right? So like printed material,

00:22:42    SPEAKER_04
and then also audio spoken data material. For the text data, which is the majority of it, we have news articles. We have discussion forums, right? So like something like Reddit, you know, the kind of thing where people are seeing the conversation. It's casual, but sometimes long. Long paragraphs are written, and also social media, much like tweets, basically, or other kinds of short social media.

00:23:10    SPEAKER_04
short social media. And then with audio, we have broadcast dialogue and also, I think, broadcast news there. And it has been interesting to see how these things have differed. So, like I said, in the first year,

00:23:26    SPEAKER_04
this was two years ago at this point, we were in our surprise language, which is the language in the, we're actually like being tested. This is where the government says go and then you have, you know, an X amount of time to build your system. We were using Uyghur in there. We found that we had really rich, interesting information, I think, in discussion forums or in news articles in particular. The event was about an earthquake, but not too much that even discussed any kind of earthquake or any kind of calamity in tweets. And I remember being told by a native informant that it could be politically sensitive. to complain too much about something,

00:24:16    SPEAKER_04
you know, earthquakes damaging houses. And so the Uyghur people, according to our native informant, was not too happy to do that. And the news articles themselves often had a bit of an official government feel to them,

00:24:32    SPEAKER_04
feel to them, I would say. There was a lot of talk about house construction to prevent earthquakes. there wasn't much of a sense of outright distress, I would say, that we would have expected to see. You didn't see that. So in the next year, we were using two languages at that point.

00:24:58    SPEAKER_04
that point. That was Tigrinya and Oromo. And these are languages that are spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and also Somalia, I think, so that region. We were getting a lot of political differences about – there was a lot of discussion. So there was civil unrest and drought, I believe, being discussed there.

00:25:23    SPEAKER_04
There was a lot of discussion of gang activity or al -Shabaab, I believe,

00:25:27    SPEAKER_04
activity or al -Shabaab, I believe, activity. And I remember you would get kind of one side saying these people were terrorists and other side saying these people were heroes. And I remember one particular time a native informant reading an article saying, you know, they were saying that this is happening, this is happening, but that's totally not true. They wouldn't do that. And so you have these questions of, you know, it's maybe not clear what the truth is there. Right. And so in,

00:25:57    SPEAKER_04
and I suppose, I think that was a bit more of a, that was a more of an urban area kind of setting. The addition of the region is more rural. Don't hold me to that. I haven't been on the ground in these places. Your job is not to assign a level of validity to the source. It's really just to do the science of the translation. That is true.

00:26:22    SPEAKER_04
So I very much do focus on translation, but the program overall is focused on not only translation, but on recognizing... The names of people and places and facilities and organizations kind of highlighting those things and figuring out when, like, the same person is being referred to multiple times. You know, you can refer to a person or you can refer to anything in more than one way, right?

00:26:47    SPEAKER_04
You can talk about, you know. Yeah, good guys and bad guys and whether you're using the proper name or a code name or something else. Exactly. People have nicknames or just using a pronoun. It's not necessarily clear. It may be clear to us as humans,

00:27:05    SPEAKER_04
as humans, but it can be difficult for a computer to figure out who the he is referring to, especially if two men are mentioned at the same time. But through context, we can usually figure out based on our knowledge of the world.

00:27:21    SPEAKER_04
We can figure out what's going on, but it can be very hard for a computer to do that. And then on top of that,

00:27:26    SPEAKER_00
And then on

00:27:27    SPEAKER_04
we're trying to figure out, given a document, more or less what the entire situation is on the ground. So, you know, what is the overall event that's being described and what are the needs that people have and have those needs been met and to what degree is there a sense of urgency?

00:27:47    SPEAKER_04
sense of urgency? So they're kind of like, essentially you can think of it as like an entire analyst summary of maybe... be a document or even maybe multiple documents. So this is an extremely challenging job. For that latter, for that last part in particular, it is helpful to know what the truth is. And so I do focus mostly on the machine translation in there. It's more like, okay, given that there's this document, how should that document be translated, right? And Dr. May, is the long -term intent that DARPA has set out to have a... a tool that could be on a dashboard somehow or a mobile device? Do they have a vision for how the tool could be used for the military or for USAID or other U .S. assets? I don't want to put words in darkness now. Okay. But in particular, we are definitely, although we're doing basic research in this program, we are tasked with delivering systems that are... clients can use. I think that different clients have had different needs.

00:28:55    SPEAKER_04
It could be adaptable. Many clients want to work in an air -gapped environment.

00:29:03    SPEAKER_04
security, secure data. Uh, and so, you know, we need to be mindful of that. A lot of times research systems can be built on a variety of computers in a university and, you know, we'll call out to the internet. Um, you know, that's not going to fly for, uh, for somebody that's working with, uh, with the, you know, data that needs clearance. Um, uh, and, um, uh, and yes, it, it's definitely the case that, uh, I've heard from, uh, from clients. I've met at demo days that they're operating in the field, so they need to run on a laptop or a tough book in the field. I want to be careful. Like I said, I don't know exactly what DARPA's particular needs are here, but it definitely varies,

00:29:47    SPEAKER_04
DARPA's particular

00:29:52    SPEAKER_04
I think. That's fascinating. Well, what is your timeline and your team's involvement? Are you going to be collecting data over the next year or two? Is this a contract that you have that's long -term? Yeah, well, so I think the program term is about four years, and it's divided into phases, and there are checkpoints. sometimes funding is altered and sometimes there are down selects. And this is kind of the standard world of the government research. And the way a lot of these programs work is that we're in, there are multiple teams that are working on more or less the same program all at once. So there are teams at Carnegie Mellon and Johns Hopkins and the University of Washington. Let's see, where else? All over the place. I'm forgetting some of my friends. Everywhere, wow. Do you guys get together once in a while to share notes? So we share notes, and the nice thing about this is that we meet and we learn from each other. We'll go in different directions, and if somebody's technology is working better, then we'll say, oh, okay, why did you do that? And this comes up in academic conferences, and they also come up at our regular program meetings. There's kind of a nice big sea of ideas there, and it's a nice way to exchange ideas and to also kind of have a common goal that we're all striving for. So anyway, your question was, yes, it's about four years. We're in, I think it's called phase two at this point, and we have another evaluation coming up in June, and the evaluations keep on getting harder and harder. So the first year we had 28 days, and the second year we had 21. We might have, I think, fewer this time. We do our best to try to actually get to the end condition even as early as possible.

00:31:45    SPEAKER_04
as early as possible. So even in year one, we're producing a 24 -hour system. So you say 28 days and then ratchet down 21 days. That's when DARPA gives you a language and a scenario, you have to put it together as quickly as you can. As quickly as we can with checkpoints that will terminate in the first year. We had 28 days. That's the whole evaluation program. We got our data packs, and then in seven days, our first system was due. And then after a total of 14 days,

00:32:17    SPEAKER_04
so seven more days, our second was due. And then after 28 days, the third one was due. So the system would get on better. And when we meet, we also compare notes and everybody.

00:32:22    SPEAKER_02
system would

00:32:26    SPEAKER_04
You know, everybody who's been evaluating together, we see, oh, you know, what did you do with this period? What did you do with that period? Oh, you know, boy, it was really hard communicating with Native Informant 2. Yeah, but Native Informant 4 was great. And, you know, we learned that we asked this kind of survey question, and it works really well. And it's really great, actually. But so, yeah. You have the most junior postdoc student on coffee duty to keep you alive and moving the whole time? It's something like that, yeah. I mean, I think... I'm at this level. I'm not super senior and I'm not super junior, but I'm super stressed. So, you know, you're spending a lot of hours on native informant duty and making sure,

00:33:05    SPEAKER_04
and making sure, you know, we have to, when you're submitting... your system to be scored you know you want to make sure that all your eyes are dotted and all your t's are crossed right uh and i double check and double check and double check that you did everything right because it's like uh taking an exam basically you want to make sure you've done really well uh but of course you know the evaluation is really it kind of it drives you in a way right because you're you're you know this is that's the the big adrenaline rush uh but it's all in service of developing technology And the real benefit is there's been some really great progress in developing language universal tools, systems that are allowing humans to, so allowing monolingual English speakers to act like bilingual speakers. So one of the big systems, one of the big advantages that we've had is we developed this tool that lets us act like we are the native informant and create translation data because we're so data hungry.

00:33:57    SPEAKER_04
like we are the native informant and create translation data because we're so data hungry. We'd like to get data that's about the domain in question that's in the foreign language and English so that we can build good translation systems. We just don't have that data at first, so we need to somehow get some. And the native informants, we don't get too much time with them. So we can only, and asking people who are not experienced translators to just translate documents for us, it's very tough to do that. We built a system that allows us to actually, even though I don't speak a Roma or Tabernia or Uyghur, it kind of merges the artificial,

00:34:37    SPEAKER_04
the machine translation technology, so the AI, with my own human intuition. So if I can look at a bunch of possible translations of a sentence or possible translations of the words of a sentence, and I can kind of get a sense for what the sentence should be about, and then knowing something about world knowledge lets me be a better translator of that sentence. Like at one point I remember seeing, I can't remember, I think it was, I want to say Czech or... We were trying some trials before our real evaluation. And I don't know anything about Hungarian. But I remember seeing something where they were talking about earthquake in Japan. And then it was like, you can see it from space. And I was like, that's impossible. And I was like, no, no, I remember seeing an article about how the earthquake was so powerful that you could actually see effects of it from space. And then something kind of clicks on.

00:35:22    SPEAKER_00
no, I remember

00:35:30    SPEAKER_04
And then I was able to translate the rest of the document much more easily because I had my access to world knowledge. It's really hard to teach computers to do that still. But I was able to... use that to build a little data set. And building that little data set is very helpful in making sure that your systems are good.

00:35:48    SPEAKER_04
making sure that your systems are good. You're like Neo in the Matrix. You plug it into the side of your head and you figure it out. We haven't gotten to that point yet. We're going to actually plug the computers into the brains and use them, but we're kind of there. Speaking of the brains also, I mentioned this deep learning technology has been wildly successful. There's been a lot of news about it. the programs that can do really well at Go or ChessNow. And the thing about these technologies is that they're extremely data hungry. So they work really well when you've got hundreds of millions or billions of words of examples of translations. And they don't work so well when we don't have a lot of data, when we maybe only have a few hundred thousand words of the Bible translated. And so one, we've been really pushing on this. Because when they do work, they work great. So we want to be able to have them work when you don't have a lot of data. And so we're actively developing techniques for allowing translation systems to be built that are as fluent as these really nice deep learning models that don't have to be translated on all the French English in the world. I would think that as machine processing power and as technology shrinks, or at least capacity to process on a smaller device improves over time, that something more applicable to the field would be more likely. So if we had a civil affairs team somewhere, a pocket -sized approach, instead of having the processing capabilities that you have at USC. I don't know what it requires right now, but if we could shrink that down over time, much more applicable to teams in the field. Absolutely.

00:37:30    SPEAKER_04
I think we are mindful of that. So you do see a lot of work on, especially because these models are pretty big, these really nice ones. So there's been a lot of work on shrinking them down, on getting them to fit on a cell phone processor. And, of course, the cell phone processors are getting bigger as well,

00:37:50    SPEAKER_04
better as well. yeah that's that's a key concern you know we want to there you want to make sure yeah the data can fit on the on the phone and the uh and the processing can too and that it's not going to drain the battery super quickly of course because right because you start doing a whole lot of processing on your phone then all of a sudden the phone goes off as well um so yeah so so and then you know to the degree that we're making we're able to be successful there we have to go outside of ai right we have to look at um the you know uh kind of the

00:38:07    SPEAKER_04
start doing a whole lot of processing on your phone then all of a sudden the phone goes off as well um so yeah so so and then you know to the degree that we're making we're able to be successful there we have to go outside of ai right we have to look at um the you know uh kind of the Computer engineering and electrical engineering and how do you make hardware better? What kind of core algorithms can you use to shrink stuff down so it can fit? So there's been some really great work on that as well. Absolutely. Well, is there any way that your team wanted to get connected to civil affairs to find out a little bit more about what we do or maybe psychological operations? Because they're deeply involved with monitoring media. the targets that we have and populations that we are mindful of when we're in other countries. So from those two perspectives, it would be very helpful, I think, for your team to understand the types of questions we ask, why we ask them, and why it's important to the Army and the Marine Corps and civil affairs. Well, I think this came up, actually. I wasn't thinking about this ahead of time, but like I said, the interaction with Native informants is something that I imagine is... You might have a book on that already, that you guys have way more experience than we do in that kind of engagement.

00:39:28    SPEAKER_04
of engagement. So I think that would be useful. Another more kind of fundamental aspect is that you already told me a little bit like it's important for the foreign operating people to be able to have stuff that's going to fit in a small space. And a lot of times the work that we do is targeted at I hear that a lot, right? And the more exposure that we as researchers can have, at least speaking for myself, the more I understand the pain that people who actually want to use their technology have, actually the better ideas I have, really, and the more responsive I can be, right? So I think there are pains that you experience that I don't even know about. And if I did know about them, they could... They could open a completely new area of research that I'd, you know, get super excited about. So, yeah, I mean, just talking with people, seeing how you work to the degree that that's possible is, I think,

00:40:31    SPEAKER_04
would be super helpful. I mean, and, you know, it can go both ways to some degree, right? So, like, when we produce some system that doesn't work for you, you know, it's helpful if we've had a conversation already about what we're doing. You know, we don't have the problem where we're talking. own terminologies past each other right we do understand each other's world so that we can you know get the right the right interaction between there and resolve whatever problems we do have absolutely if i'm being clear enough but like i think that sometimes you have really there's really simple issues but they can be complicated by a lack of for better for better expression translation i mean you translate between just one one person one field's experience and the others

00:41:13    SPEAKER_04
one field's experience and the others Dr. Jonathan May, I want to thank you for your time. Thank you for being here on the 1CA podcast and talking about Lorelei, the low resource languages for engagement and incidents, and the program that you're working on for DARPA. It's fascinating, and I'm sure that we'll stay in touch after this to talk about how we can connect your team with civil affairs, active duty, and reserve elements, and possibly psychological operations as well for the Army and Marine Corps to help you make some progress. That sounds great. It's been really a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for spending some time with us. Please subscribe and come back for another installment of 1CA.