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News Brief
- December 13, 2011
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Tracing Siri’s DNA to Carnegie Mellon
When iPhone4S users ask a question of Siri, the smartphone’s female-voiced personal assistant app, they are tapping into technologies with DNA that can be traced, in part, to Carnegie Mellon University. A number of CMU scientists were involved in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called Cognitive Agent that Learns and Observes, or CALO. Part of DARPA’s Personal Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, CALO was focused on creating a digital personal assistant that could anticipate and help meet a user’s needs, find information on the Internet and perform tasks such as taking notes of meetings.
CALO was run by SRI International and included researchers at a number of universities. After the program concluded in 2007, SRI spun-off Siri, which Apple acquired last year. “Siri’s actually a really great project that’s based on ideas that were developed over the past decade or so at CMU and elsewhere,” said Alex Rudnicky, research professor in the Computer Science Department and one of the principal investigators for CALO at CMU. “It’s hard for us to claim any bit of code in Siri,” he added, “but the kinds of things we talked about (during CALO) may have made SRI realize that this was possible.”
Contact:
Byron Spice
412.268.9068
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
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About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a
distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business,
public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and
graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating
and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration,
and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for
close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive
on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among
leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of
Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif.,
and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe.
For more, see www.cmu.edu.
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