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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.
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