The CALO Vision

The PAL concept was created by DARPA Director Tony Tether, Ron Brachman, and then IPTO Deputy Director Zachary Lemnios. Their conception of the problem of the brittleness of complex systems and its solution by adaptive learning systems is outlined in “DARPA’s New Cognitive Systems Vision” and DARPA’s solicitation for “Cognitive Information Processing Technology.”

Brachman and Lemnios defined the problem of brittle, easily broken systems as follows: “While today’s computers are more powerful than ever, we have been lured by processing power and inexpensive memory into creating systems that are enormously large and complex. Many of today’s systems are virtually impossible for humans to understand, use, or maintain.

“Beyond the resulting maintenance problem, with the total lifetime cost of systems now heavily dominated by after-production costs, this complexity has also led to serious vulnerabilities. More complexity means greater opportunity for intruders. More elements mean more ways that things can go wrong; systems crash and software rots. And the training burden and level of expertise required to cope with systems both keep growing. In order to make our systems more reliable, more secure, and more understandable, and to continue making substantial contributions to society, we need to do something dramatically different.”

Brachman and Lemnios's vision of how to solve the problem of brittle systems is based on a fundamental change in the way software systems are designed: “IPTO is attacking this problem by driving a fundamental change in computing systems. By giving systems more cognitive capabilities, we believe we can make them more responsible for their own behavior and maintenance. Ideally, in the next generation, a computer system will be cognizant of its role in a larger organization or team (and of the overarching goals of that team), capable of acting autonomously, and able to interact rationally with other systems and humans in real time. It will also be able to take care of itself in a self-aware and knowledgeable way.

“Ultimately, these new capabilities will be the basis for artificial systems that can respond as robustly to surprise as natural systems can. A cognitive computer system should be able to learn from its experience, as well as by being advised. It should be able to explain what it was doing and why it was doing it, and to recover from mental blind alleys. It should be able to reflect on what goes wrong when an anomaly occurs, and anticipate such occurrences in the future. It should be able to reconfigure itself in response to environmental changes. And it should be able to be configured, maintained, and operated by non-experts. . . Core technology will include learning, knowledge, representation, reasoning, communication, perception, and multiagent systems.” More.