Raytheon takes on brainy intell project

Company will research how the brain processes large amounts of unstructured data.

Raytheon Co. is working a $3 million project with the intelligence community to figure out how the brain processes massive amounts of what the company calls “haphazard, partial information.”

The company’s BBN Technologies unit, an early developer of the Internet, won the contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The project is part of the Integrated Cognitive-Neuroscience Architectures for Understanding Sensemaking (ICARUS) program.

The company said the research could have commercial and military benefits such as rapid intelligence analysis battlefield video, audio and text data.