Learning in the Wild: Experiences Assembling and Living With CALO

Adam Cheyer, SRI International

CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) is one of DARPA's most ambitious efforts to develop a persistent assistant that lives with, learns from, and supports users in managing the complexities of their daily work lives. A multi-year project that unites some 200+ researchers from 25 academic and commercial organizations, the goal is to produce a single system where learning happens "in vivo", inside an ever-evolving agent that can observe, comprehend, reason, anticipate, act, and communicate.

This talk will present an overview of the CALO project: what CALO does, how we (and it) are trying to do it, how CALO is being evaluated. We will also discuss the future: where we are trying to lead the community of CALO researchers, and where are potential opportunities for breakthroughs in the field of AI and Persistent Assistants.