IBM honors Missoula company TerraEchos for sensor

The bad guys want to drop a bomb on a power plant – but the plant has a secret weapon.

It’s a powerful ear. The ear, a sensor buried underground, can hear the slightest sound. Footsteps. Tree roots creaking underground. The wind blowing through branches.

This gizmo, the AdelosS4, has another superpower. It can identify all those sounds at once in real time. And when it detects a particular noise – the spinning propellers of a plane, say – it pinpoints the plane’s location and alerts plant security.

TerraEchos http://www.terraechos.com/ , a Missoula company owned by S&K Technologies http://www.sktcorp.com/ , created the AdelosS4. The threat on the power plant is hypothetical, but the technology and its "high-performance" capabilities are both real and state-of-the-art.

The engine in the AdelosS4 uses IBM technology to read the gobs of acoustic data, and in a local ceremony Monday, IBM http://www.ibm.com honored TerraEchos with its CTO (chief technology officer) Innovation Award.

Based in Pablo, S&K Electronics http://www.skecorp.com/ designs and manufactures the AdelosS4, and TerraEchos http://www.terraechos.com/ spun out of GCS Research http://www.gcs-research.com/ .

By KEILA SZPALLER of the Missoulian

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/news/state-and-regional/article_47302c92-fc4b-11df-afb3-001cc4c03286.html