The start of an AI revolution?
An announcement recently surfaced on the blogosphere about Siri, borne from the “largest Artificial Intelligence project in U.S. history.” The project referred to is CALO, which is what they call a “cognitive assistant.” That basically means they apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to a personal assistant, very similar to the original Semantic Web vision.
I am particularly interested in this because I did some work as an undergrad on a project that had much overlap with CALO. Apparently, it takes the best of natural language processing and knowledge-based systems (among other related fields) for its functionality (which is still very secret).
I suspected this type of work was 10-15 years away from commerciability. If they plan to release something in the first half of 2009, then I was about a decade off, which is very exciting news. They coalescence of such research into a commercial product could mean the next big wave in computing technology during the next decade. Combine this with the rise of ubiquitous and mobile computing, along with social media, then we will have a rapidly changing–and exciting–world ahead of us.
Check out the TechCrunch article for more details.