Software that learns from users

The thing that makes computers a huge pain for everybody, says Pedro Domingos, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington, is that you have to explain to them every little detail of what they need to do. "It's really annoying," Domingos jokes. "They're stupid."

That's why Domingos is taking part in CALO, a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."

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