SIRI
RISING
HUFFINGTON
01.27.13
sure,” says Kittlaus. “Siri is just a
poster child, but it goes way, way
beyond that.”
ASA MATHAT/COURTESY OF MORGENTHALER VENTURES
REPORTING FOR DUTY
AT ‘NERD CITY’
Thirty-five years after HAL’s big
screen debut, turning the stuff of
science fiction into fact fell to perhaps the only organization with a
more outlandish imagination than
a Lucas or Spielberg: the Defense
Department.
In 2003, the agency’s investment arm, DARPA, tapped the
non-profit research institute SRI
International to lead a five-year,
500-person effort to build a virtual assistant, one the government hoped might yield software
to help military commanders with
both information overload and office chores. Although it wasn’t the
project’s mission, this helper, the
Cognitive Assistant that Learns
and Organizes, or CALO, would
ultimately provide the inspiration
and model for Siri.
The Defense Department’s financial backing, $150 million in
all, united hundreds of top-tier
artificial intelligence experts for
an ambitious and uncertain endeavor that most corporate R&D
labs could only dream of tackling:
teaching computers to learn in
the wild. The army of engineers at
“nerd city” — one SRI researcher’s nickname for the lab — were
tasked with creating a PC-based
helper smart enough to learn by
observing a user’s behavior, and
all the people, projects and topics relevant to her work. The undertaking was “by any measure,
the largest AI program in history,”
says David Israel, one of the lead
researchers on CALO.
The CALO project was part of
the PAL (Personal Assistant that
Gary
Morgenthaler,
a partner at
Morgenthaler
Ventures, one
of the two
first venture
capital firms
to invest in
Siri.