Tactical Iraqi wins 2007 I/ITSEC Serious Games Showcase & Challenge

Tactical Iraqi wins DARPA's 2005 Award for Significant Technical Achievement

"I can best summarize Tactical Iraqi's success by quoting one soldier's words: 'I learned more Arabic in one day with it than I learned in my whole tour in Iraq.'"
Dr. Anthony J. Tether, Director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

"The idea is to put behind every steering wheel and behind every trigger finger in a foreign country a little bit of that culture and language....I'll be happy if this could save just one life by preventing a misunderstanding."
Dr. Ralph Chatham, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

About us

The Tactical Language & Culture Training Systems are produced by Tactical Language Training LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alelo Inc.

Alelo is the Hawaiian word for language, which is at the heart of our mission to transform how people learn how to communicate. Our initial emphasis is on foreign languages and cultures.

A bit of history

Our language-training products started in 2003 as a research project at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute under funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA Program Manager Dr. Ralph Chatham was inspired to start the program after listening to one of the first soldiers who went into Afghanistan in 2002. The captain told how he and his comrades reluctantly rode on tiny ponies into a town, totally relying on their Northern Alliance escorts who only spoke Pashto and some broken Russian and Arabic while the U.S. soldiers only spoke English and some broken Russian and Arabic. When the town’s people came out on the streets the soldiers did not know if they were friendly or hostile from their gestures, demeanor and words.

Dr. Chatham explains, “I wanted to ensure that no American soldier or Marine would again ride blind into a foreign culture. I challenged the research community to create a training tool that would teach the brain behind every trigger finger and behind every steering wheel a bit of the gestures, culture and mission-oriented vocabulary of the land they were in. I also told the researchers that they had to perform the training with only two discontinuous weeks of contact time with the students.”

In 2004, the U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. Marine Corps agreed with DARPA to transition the project's prototypes from the lab into field use by the U.S. Armed Services. In 2005, the project’s lead researchers at USC started our company to further develop and commercialize the products.

Our team

We employ professionals in instructional design and development (pedagogy, curriculum development, educational psychology, adult learning), linguistics and foreign languages, computer science (artificial intelligence, automated speech recognition, software engineering, modeling, simulation), video games, human factors, graphics arts and animation, and media production. (Visit our careers page if you wish to apply for a position with us.)

Collectively, our employees are fluent in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Farsi, and Japanese; and have a working knowledge of Urdu, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Pashto, Greek, Dari, Malay, Latin, Thai, and Cherokee. This lets us communicate properly in the native tongues of 65% of the world's population.

RICHARD KOFFLER | Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Koffler has been growing entrepreneurial software companies for over 20 years. Prior to becoming our CEO he incubated several start-ups as CEO of Koffler Ventures LLC; immediately before that he led the growth and eventual acquisition by a public company of a healthcare information systems vendor. He is a member of the Tech Coast Angels; past-president of both the Los Angeles Venture Association and the Software Council of Southern California; and a member of the advisory boards of both the Center for Technology Commercialization at the University of Southern California, and the Wells Fargo Center for Small Business and Entrepreneurship at the College of Business Administration and Economics at California State University, Northridge. He holds computer science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. He is fluent in Spanish and English, and has basic knowledge of German.

W. LEWIS JOHNSON, PH.D. | Co-founder, Chief Scientist
Dr. Johnson co-founded our company while he was director of the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, where he was the principal investigator of the Tactical Language project that resulted in our products. He left USC ISI in 2007 to join us full time, but continues to be active in research focusing on the successful adoption of interactive learning environments. His work on Tactical Iraqi won DARPA's Significant Technical Achievement Award in 2005. Dr. Johnson was program co-chair of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces in 2003, past president of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society, and past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group for Artificial Intelligence. He holds a B.A. in linguistics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University. He is fluent in English, French, German, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic; and has a working knowledge of Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, Malay, Pashto, Greek, Dari, and Cherokee.

ANDRE VALENTE, PH.D. M.B.A. | Co-founder, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Valente co-founded our company while he was deputy leader of the Tactical Language project at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. He joined our company full time in 2006. He has over 20 years of experience in management, technology development, and research in knowledge-based systems, ontologies, and intelligent teaching systems. Dr. Valente helped start and was vice-president of operations for Coordinated Software Systems, another spin-off from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. His career includes managing numerous engineering and operations teams for manufacturing, media, aerospace and e-business companies. Dr. Valente holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Amsterdam and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California. He is fluent in Portuguese and English; and has a working knowledge of Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish.