COLUMBIA, Md., April 22 -- Essex Corp. has announced it will acquire Computer Science Innovations (CSI) of Melbourne, Fla. The acquisition will be subject to customary conditions and is expected to close within the next several weeks. CSI develops cognitive processing technology and has proprietary techniques, algorithms and tools that are used to build custom "cognitive engines" for intelligence, defense and commercial customers and applications. The employee-owned company employees 35 and has an annual revenue of approximately $7.5 million. "Coupling the Essex optical processing technology with CSI's cognitive processing algorithms offers the possibility of breaking through processing barriers that have limited the intelligence and effectiveness of computers," said Arthur Money, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) and a member of Essex's board. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced in March that cognitive computing is one of its strategic areas of focus. Examples of cognitive applications include helping intelligence analysts identify critical new information, capturing and organizing unstructured text and intelligent searching of the Internet. James Devine, executive vice president and general manager at Essex, said, "There are four main elements of CSI's technology and capabilities: data mining and information extraction, natural language processing, machine reasoning and data fusion. These are the next generation of tools needed to solve intelligence and homeland security information problems. We have already started integrating these tools to expand our solutions offerings to our existing customers and to reach out to new customers in homeland security and other rapidly growing markets." Essex develops advanced signal and image processing technology for commercial, defense and intelligence markets. For more information, visit: www.essexcorp.com