Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes

Overview
Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO) was an artificial intelligence project that attempted to integrate numerous AI technologies into a cognitive assistant. The name "CALO" was inspired by the Latin word "calonis," 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 smartphones 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. 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.