CALO is the “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes. After spending some time on the website, I gather that it will automate many of the ‘mundane’ activities in our worklives (e.g. set up meetings with the right people at the right times, and best yet, prepare you with relevant information), based on interactions, activities, and instructions.
Think: Intelligent Amazingness-- it seemingly learns your preferences and priorities by your desktop activities, online behavior, who you physically come into contact with, and perhaps even how you interact with these individuals. From the website:
“The goal of the project is to create software 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.”Although it seems unrelated, in a later post, I want to talk about this in relation to Facebook Connect and Friend Connect. I shouldn’t even make this link because the CALO concept is wholly unrelated, but I think it’s important to call out the differences in predicting future behavior based on our daily behaviors, ‘bumper stickers,’ and our connections.
I’ll just say, I’m a huge proponent of figuring out who people are, and anticipating future behavior by what they do in their daily lives-- in fact, it was the topic of my dissertation. I’ve been anti- self-report measures for several years and several reasons.
So this is an exciting development - a new model of intelligent software learning about your worklife and how you navigate it- bound to play a critical role in the evolution of the web and enterprise, even if just inferring what I want for lunch.
