CALO 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 provide an overview of CALO: the what, the how, the why. We'll cover CALO's six major functional areas (organize information, prepare information artifacts, mediate communications, schedule and optimize time, manage tasks, aquire and allocate resources) and the kinds of learning that takes place during these functions. We'll also discuss what it's like to interact with CALO and some of the design choices made in building the system.