Raytheon Company
's (
RTN
) subsidiary Raytheon BBN Technologies has entered into an
agreement worth $16 million, funded by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency ("DARPA") and the U.S. Air Force
Research Laboratory ("AFRL"). This contract comes under the U.S.
Department of Defense's ("DoD") Deep Exploration and Filter of
Text ("DEFT") program.
The DoD professionals gather and route numerous data from a wide
range of national as well as international sources to form and
review its future strategies, and implement those in the mission.
DARPA sets up the DEFT program to connect and improve the
natural-language processing ("NLP") technology. This program
enables the DoD to improve its filtering capacity to locate
operationally important information and send alerts to the
concerned analysts.
Currently, rise in international terror activities are a vital
threat for the human civilization and in most of the cases the
terrorists target innocent civilians. Most of the countries are
improving strength of their arsenals as well as intelligence
infrastructures to counter this challenge.
Like other countries, the U.S. is also actively contributing to
demolish global terrorism. They spend substantial amount for
upgrading their overall defense systems including foreign
language analysis mechanisms as well as data encryption
processes.
Raytheon's decade-old expertise in speech and language
technologies enables it to get federal contracts backed by the
DoD for improving language identification and filter tools. Under
the DARPA and AFRL's support, Raytheon manufactures new devices
to examine texts and encode messages. In addition, it creates new
methods for deducing meanings, finding out links and detecting
anomalies in texts. Raytheon also develops apparatus to
assimilate new information into existing large data-store. We
believe increase in demand on language and speech detection tools
will enable the company to improve its financial
performance.
We view Raytheon as a well-positioned organization among the
large defense players due to its non-platform-centric focus, as
well as its strong order bookings of $18.6 billion and order
backlog of approximately $35 billion at the end of the first nine
months of 2012.
However, these positives may to some extent mitigate by factors
like fate of high-cost programs related to chances over rise in
future U.S. defense budget cut backs, and risks related to
postponements and cancellations of key projects.
Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon Company is a technology and
innovation leader specializing in defense, homeland security and
other government markets throughout the world.
With a market capitalization of $18.72 billion, the company has
71,000 full-time employees. Both Raytheon and one of its peers
L-3 Communications Holdings Inc.
(
LLL
) currently have a short-term Zacks #3 Rank (Hold rating).
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