CALO, or Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes is a DARPA artificial intelligence project with an extremely ambitious scope. Even the anagram, CALO is derived from the Latin word "calonis," which means "soldier?s servant."
The goal of CALO is to create cognitive AI systems, that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.
The software, which learns by interacting with and being advised by its users, will handle a broad range of interrelated decision-making tasks that have in the past been impossible to automate. The hope is that even if CALO's ambitions are not fully realised, parts of the work will be invaluable in lessening the 'stupidity' of computer systems, which need to be told what to do each step of the way.
To focus research on real problems and ensure the software meets requirements such as privacy, security, and trust, the CALO project researchers themselves are using the technology during its development.
The size and scope of CALO is so huge, that the initial phase, lasting five years, and due to complete in 2009, has been spread around 22 institutions:
SRI International
Boeing Phantom Works
Carnegie Mellon University
Sybase iAnywhere
Fetch Technologies, Inc.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Oregon Health & Science University
Oregon State University
Radar Networks, Inc.
Stanford University
State University of New York - Stony Brook
University of California at Berkeley
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
University of Rochester
University of Southern California and its Information Sciences Institute
The University of Texas at Austin
University of Washington
University of West Florida's Institute of Human and Machine Cognition
Yale University |