CALO

CALO
Original author(s)SRI International
TypeIntelligent software assistant
LicenseProprietary

CALO was an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant. CALO is an acronym for "Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes". The name was inspired by the Latin word "Calo" which means "soldier's servant". The project started in May 2003 and ran for five years, ending in 2008.

The CALO effort has had many major spin-offs, most notably the Siri intelligent software assistant that is now part of the Apple iOS since iOS 5, delivered in several phones and tablets; Social Kinetics, a social application that learned personalized intervention and treatment strategies for chronic disease patients, sold to RedBrick Health; the Trapit project, which is a web scraper and news aggregator that makes intelligent selections of web content based on user preferences; Tempo AI, a smart calendar; Desti, a personalized travel guide; and Kuato Studios, a game development startup.

CALO was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) program.[1][2] DARPA's five-year contract brought together over 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of building a new generation of cognitive assistants 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. SRI International was the lead integrator responsible for coordinating the effort to produce an assistant that can live with and learn from its users, provide value to them, and then pass a yearly evaluation that measures how well the system has learned to do its job.[3]

  1. ^ Markoff, John (14 December 2008). "A Software Secretary That Takes Charge". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 7 June 2012. Retrieved 14 December 2008.
  2. ^ "Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL)". DARPA. Archived from the original on 2011-08-05. Retrieved 2013-05-18.
  3. ^ Center, Pew Research (2018-12-10). "3. Improvements ahead: How humans and AI might evolve together in the next decade". Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved 2023-11-07.